Tag: Trinity

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not a Trinitarian Chapter 10

Does the Trinity contradict Math? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Once again, Buzzard pretty much has one main argument and that is how he keeps playing the game over and over. Here, he wants to keep stressing that there is one God. The Jews at the time of Jesus would have said they worshipped one God. This is never challenged in the New Testament. Nor should it be! Buzzard apparently doesn’t know that Trinitarianism doesn’t challenge this either. In reality, we couldn’t be Trinitarians if there was more than one God.

He says that the important point about Messiah is that He is a human representative. If He is God Himself, then we have two who are God and biblical monotheism is threatened. One would have hoped that by this point, Buzzard would have moved beyond this argument, but no. If you made a drinking game based on how many times he presented this argument, you would die of alcohol poisoning before finishing the book. (Except for my fellow Baptists as we would just have drunk a lot of grape juice.)

He says that in the Shema, Trinitarians have done verbal acrobatics to argue that one does not mean one. No. None of us have. Now there have been arguments that echad can refer to a compound unity, which is true, but no one has denied that an echad is one. One reads this wanting to see if Buzzard will ever get it through his head that his opponents believe in one God. I don’t know what position Buzzard is arguing against, but it sure isn’t one his opponents hold.

We have talked already about how he says the sense of the Greek word eis when used of Jesus and God is that they are one person. This is the game Buzzard plays. When we point to our interpretation, we are adding to the text. When Buzzard says eis means one person instead of just, you know, one, that’s solid and faithful interpretation!

Rules for thee, but not for me!

It’s arguments like this that lead me to think Buzzard is just being dishonest. He is counting on the average Christian reading this not being skilled in Biblical interpretation, and sadly, he will likely be right. We have plenty of Christians who will be able to jump to Revelation and argue for the rapture, but they won’t have a clue how to answer someone like this.

We have a problem.

He has also brought up the claim of Jesus and the rich man with Jesus asking “Why do you call me good?” This is one we have already dealt with in this series. He also says James was a unitarian also saying that you believe God is one? Good. So do the demons, and they tremble. Well, yes, but again, I as a Trinitarian will say the exact same statement. God is one.

Again, Buzzard is counting on his audience being ignorant and suspecting they won’t know the counter-arguments to his positions. I fear he is right in that. We need to do a lot more to educate our churches on the essential positions of their faith and what they believe instead of secondary doctrines and making every sermon about application.

He later makes another type of argument meant to fool the unsuspecting saying:

Later church fathers admitted that their Trinitarian view of God was not found in Moses. Church father Epiphanius says: “The divine unity was first and foremost proclaimed by Moses, the duality (the distinction between Father and Son) was heavily stressed by the prophets, and the Trinity was clearly shown forth in the Gospel.”

But this is just progressive revelation. We might as well say to Buzzard, “Then please show where in Moses we find the Messiah will be crucified and raised from the dead in the middle of space and time and sit at the Father’s right hand? Oh! You can’t find it spelled out there? Then your view of Jesus is not found in Moses!”

This is the absurdity of Buzzard’s position. If the rules were changed for the doctrines he believes, then they would be seen just as false. Does he want to say nothing new about God was revealed in Jesus? If he believes in any kind of progressive revelation in Jesus, then he has views that aren’t found in Moses.

Keep in mind the rules. They only apply to what Trinitarians believe. What Buzzard already believes is exempt.

Lastly, he concludes with saying that if the Torah had wanted us to know God was more than one, it would have told us about the Trinity. Again, we hold that God is one. We might as well still ask where the Torah talks about the crucified Messiah.

Rules for thee, but not for me.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 9

Is Buzzard a good detective? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In this chapter which Buzzard calls Detective Work and Word Tricks, we’ll get to see Buzzard try to deal with some arguments against his position, but not very well. The first one to point out is again Titus 2:13. There is still no mention of the Granville Sharpe Rule and he does go back to the KJV, which was put together before that rule was brought to light. He says that evangelicals say the text is clear, but then says translations can strikingly differ and as was said, points back to the KJV. Then in the next paragraph after saying the verse is not as clear, says God and Jesus are clearly separated.

So when you don’t want to go with how it’s interpreted, it’s unclear. When you want to go with your interpretation, it’s suddenly clear. Got it!

He then goes back to begetting saying it means to be brought into existence and then says how can that apply to Jesus then in Psalm 2:7. “You are my Son. Today, I have begotten you.” Well, considering that Psalm was to be said on the day a king was coronated, we can easily say that the king was not brought into existence that day. Could it be that Buzzard’s idea of what begetting is is just wrong?

He says that for the early church, the origin of Jesus was an embarrassment. No indication is given of this. No church father is cited. This is still trying to push his point on Psalm 2:7 where Buzzard is still ignoring the context of the psalm.

He then says that orthodoxy says that Christ did not come into existing the way we do. In some way, His conception was His own doing. He assumed freely and consciously our own nature. While I wouldn’t phrase it that way exactly, yes. This is what the Son did for us.

His interpretation of John 1:1 is frankly bizarre. For Buzzard, the Word is an it instead and is the plan of God to bring about the Messiah. No word yet on how the plan can have a divine nature. Not only that, but saying the Word became flesh only means it got embodied. It doesn’t mean that it became a rational person. We would need the word Kardia for that instead.

Another quote later gives us again Buzzard is either ignorant or dishonest. Your choice:

If Mary was taking into herself a being undergoing transformation from a spiritual being to a human person , Luke and Matthew have misled us. There is no room in the womb for two persons, one added to the other. Would this be a form of twins? Mary did not bear a person who is two “wholes,” fully God and fully man. She did not bear a “double person, ” a preexisting spirit person adding to himself a human being. The biblical account of the genesis of Jesus is much simpler ]. Mary bore the blood descendant of David, one person, the promised Messiah whose coming into existence was promised for a definite moment in history. Mary conceived a child six months later than her relative Elizabeth. She did not take in and transform a person into a fetus.

Unfortunately, after seeing so much of this book, I have to go with dishonest for my guess. Buzzard should know very well Chalcedon and the rejection of Nestorianism. Despite that, he treats a Nestorian view as if it was the orthodox view. I look at this and see absolutely nothing resembling the position he should be arguing against.

He says in John 8:58, Jesus was speaking of Abraham seeing his messiahship and said “I am He.” No word on when Abraham saw this. Nothing also about why the words seem to strangely mirror the usage of the divine name in both Isaiah and Exodus. I guess Buzzard doesn’t want to deal with that.

I really wish there was more to deal with, but the arguments are so repetitive. These are the ones I have chosen to highlight this time. We’ll look at more another time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 8

What about Nicea? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In this chapter, Buzzard looks at questions surrounding the Council of Nicea and the sort of Da Vinci Code claims. Thankfully, I can’t think of any place in the book where Buzzard uses the pagan copycat idea. Give credit where credit is due, but it’s a small credit considering how bad the book is.

Unfortunately, he uses Bart Ehrman a lot (Not giving the uninformed any idea of who he is.) of usage. He says Ehrman asks how could Jesus and God be God without there being two Gods? This is still the assumption of unipersonalism and the problem is treating God as a nature in one sense and treating God as a unipersonal person in another. When we say Jesus is God, we are using theological shorthand saying that Jesus has the full nature of God.

He does use Mark 13:32 with Jesus not knowing the day and hour of His return (I think it’s His coming to His throne, but it doesn’t matter). This is at least a substantial argument. In my thinking, Jesus takes on the limitations of knowledge for His ministry where He didn’t need to know the time of His coming.

He brings up the claim later that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there is one God. He declares this problem insoluble when again, it is simple. There are three persons that each have the nature of God.

Later he says:

The great ecumenical councils that formulated the old theology were the scene of unchristian antagonisms, and bitter strife and fightings that were never rivaled in the history of any other religion, and no religion of which history has a record was ever guilty of such cruel persecutions as Christianity, whose founder was the meek and lowly Jesus of Nazareth…

Yep. Those were far fiercer than the constant raiding of the Muslims up until the time of Charles Martel and than the Crusades. Thank goodness those Muslims with suicide bombers and raiding parties were at least not as violent as the Christians. Seriously. He makes the above claim in the book and I just can’t help but think he knows NOTHING of world history on religion.

He again brings up the idea that Jesus never said “I am God.” Buzzard constantly speaks out of both sides of his mouth. At one time, he will point out the confusion that would be brought about if Jesus said this. Then in the next point, he will say that He never said this. Then he will make the same earlier point again.

He also brings up Isaiah 44:24 saying that God created all things by Himself. Who was with Him? Good question. This is especially so since we see Jesus is with Him in John 1, Hebrews 1, 1 Cor. 8, and Col. 1. I’d also include Proverbs 8.

At a later point, he says that he is not assuming that monotheism = unitarianism. He says that, but he never makes an argument to the effect to establish that. He looks in-depth at Luke 1:35 and Psalm 110:1, but he never does any in-depth exegesis of the Shema, the main passage he wants to use.

He does say that Jesus said He and the Father are one in John 10:30, but prays that the disciples be one as well. Context as always determines meaning. The Jews there seemed to understand Him and as I have said, He was pointing out that if wicked people sarcastically can be called gods, how much more a right does He, the righteous one, have the right to be called the Son of God, which they understood to be deity.

On Jesus being tempted which shows up, see here.

The next quote I want to bring up is:

The falsehood that Jesus being called “lord  proves that he is the One Lord God needs to be challenged and dismissed. Yes, there are some Old Testament “Yahweh verses” fulfilled by Jesus as Yahweh’s unique representative in the New Testament, but this no more makes Jesus identical in person with Yahweh, than the angel of the Lord is identical with the Lord God. The angel could bear the divine name without actually being God. “An agent is as his master’s person” is the well – established principle known to Judaism and so obviously true of Jesus in relation to God. Jesus spoke of the persecution of Christians as the persecution of himself ( Acts 9:4 ; 22:7 ; 26:14). This does not make Jesus and the Church identical.

No prophet ever spoke as if he were God Himself, but the Angel of the Lord certainly did and those who saw Him thought they were seeing God at least. Also, Jesus is not identical with the church, but there is something about saying the church is His body. It is true an agent can act on behalf of the person, but he is never understood to be the agent himself.

He does go to 1 Cor. 15:24-28 referencing James Dunn with the Son being subject to the Father, but notice this. Paul treats it as a change. Then the Son HImself will be subject. That is what the text says. What does that say about the Son now?

Something to think about….until next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 7

Did we listen to Gabriel? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In this chapter, Buzzard bases his case largely on Luke 1:35. If we had listened to that verse, the Trinitarian debates would have never happened. Color me skeptical again. Let’s dive in and see what it says.

At the start, one new remark he has first goes to Luke 24 where the disciples on the road to Emmaus talk about Jesus as a man. Jesus is seen as a New Moses. Okay. What’s the problem? A Trinitarian can agree. We can say that of all the figures in the Old Testament, Jesus was the fulfillment Par Excellence!

He says that in the start that Luke is writing to Theophilus. It is then unthinkable that Luke would have written something believing in a preexistent Son and making it impossible for his readers to understand that. The problem with saying X is unthinkable is that a lot of people have thought that Luke was writing about a preexistent Son.

Imagine if I decided to go to John 1:1 and say “It is unthinkable that anyone can walk away from this verse without holding that Jesus is fully God in nature.”

Does that sound powerful to you? Nope. Good. It shouldn’t.

Yet it’s one of Buzzard’s most common techniques.

Buzzard says that the word “beget” means to bring into existence. No argument is given for this claim. It is just asserted. The word simply means born and it can refer to the new birth in Christ in John 3.

One of Buzzard’s favorite passages to go to is Psalm 2:7. “You are my Son. Today, I have begotten you.” This is not about the birth of a child, but about the coronation of the king. It is not at all saying that that day, the son was born. That day, the son was in a sense adopted into royalty as the new king of Israel.

Unfortunately, this is another one of Buzzard’s common argument techniques. Say what he thinks the word means or what the text is interpreted as and that ends it.

He goes to another text, Titus 2:13, later on, that he reads as being translated as the glorious appearing of our great God and our savior Jesus Christ. No word mentioned of when God is supposed to appear. Nothing about the Granville Sharpe rule at all on this passage. Then he just says that this text can’t be used to defend the deity of Christ because translations differ and Greek ambiguity.

Hear that?! Buzzard wants to debate and he wants to tell you what you are not allowed to use. If there is any question on what the Greek means or if translations differ, throw it out!

Unless, of course, that verse is used to argue AGAINST the Trinity and then it’s all good.

He also says that He claimed always to be the Messiah, but wait. Why is it then that at very few places do we have Him saying “I am the Messiah.” He told it to the woman at the well and He said it when He was put under oath on trial. You don’t have Jesus walking all over Israel stopping at every meeting and saying “I am the Messiah!”

Buzzard has a weird definition of always.

He then goes after the term pre-existing as if to say He existed before He existed. He tells us to try to make sense of it. Explain it to your friends.

Okay. I think I’ll take a shot!

It means that Jesus existed in some sense before He existed in the incarnation.

Wow. That was sure difficult! I can’t believe no one in church history ever thought of that before!

Oh wait. They did.

He then says that a problem cannot be avoided. How can there be someone who is God on Earth while there is someone who is God in Heaven? The one on Earth also has a human body that the one in Heaven does not. How do you distinguish between the God who became man and the God who did not without destroying the unity of God?

Oh, wow. Now that’s a stumper! Let me try again!

First off, it’s not that there’s one God in Heaven and one God on Earth. We are not tritheists no matter how much he wants to make us tritheists.

Second, we can distinguish the persons then by saying one became incarnate and one didn’t. We can also say one begets and one is begotten.

Third, they are unified by having the same nature.

Folks. I am just in awe here because I can’t help but be thrilled at the amazing insights I have here that no one in church history….what? You’re saying that this has been official Christian doctrine from the church fathers on?

Oh. Yeah. I guess Buzzard didn’t know.

I also don’t expect all of Christology to be contained in Luke 1:35. We did listen to Gabriel. We also listened to everyone else.

About the only one not worth listening to is Buzzard.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 6

How should we read Psalm 110:1? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Buzzard is certainly right in saying this is the most repeated Old Testament verse in the New Testament. This is the one verse that Jesus initiated a challenge with the Pharisees over in His ministry. It was extremely foundational in the formation of early Christianity.

So is it a unitarian text?

To begin with, Buzzard says the New Testament is violated if one suggests that two persons are YHWH. Why? We’re not told. Also, if this is what he thinks, what does he do with the Old Testament where in Genesis 19:24, two persons are addressed as YHWH?

He also says Paul goes to great distinction to differentiate by saying God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. An interesting aspect of this is that this actually could go against Buzzard’s claim. If Paul is having to make some differentiation between the two, does that not indicate that there were some grounds where they were seen as similar if not equal? It’s as if he has to qualify who is meant by God now and who is meant by Lord. Would it be because that would lead to confusion if he didn’t?

He refers to Galatians 3:20 where he says Paul says God is one person. The problem is it only says God is one. Buzzard is adding the person in. Keep in mind, this is the same person who complains when he thinks Trinitarian interpreters are changing the text to fit their biases. Rules for thee, but not for me! He even says in this chapter that “the translator or translators have the power to direct the reader’s thinking beyond what the original Greek had meant.” Oh, the irony!

He says about Psalm 110 that if there are two persons who are called YHWH speaking to each other, then monotheism has been abandoned.

Why?

Buzzard doesn’t tell us. He automatically assumes that monotheism means unipersonalism. This is never argued. For someone wanting to go in-depth in explaining a text, you would think just once he would exegete the Shema.

He also says the Lordship of the Messiah was acquired by Jesus at the end of His ministry. That’s strange since I thought Elizabeth greeted Mary as the mother of her Lord and the angels said to the shepherds that Christ the Lord had been born. Eh. Angels and people speaking under the influence of the Holy Spirit. What do they know?

Later, Buzzard says

Now imagine that Peter believed that both the Father and Jesus were equally God. Then God had allowed God to be crucified and God had raised God to His right hand? Does this make the slightest sense? God sitting at the right hand of God would present the audience with a blatantly polytheistic system. God is not two. He is only one. The heritage of Israel would have been overthrown if the Messiah were now to be included as an eternal member of a plural Godhead. No Jew could possibly have been prepared for the notion that the Messiah was part of the Godhead. The Hebrew Bible had announced no such thing . It would have been a staggering innovation, requiring pages of explanation, to say that the Messiah, adoni, my lord, was really the One God of Israel, who was now mysteriously “two.”

This whole paragraph is full of straw men and parodies of what Trinitarians believe and Buzzard should know better. Never mind that no Jew would have been prepared for hearing the Messiah had been crucified for the sins of the world and raised to life bodily in the middle of the age instead of at the end of all things. That too, was a staggering innovation, but free pass because Buzzard believes it.

Still, he doesn’t say why this doctrine of God would be a staggering innovation and why no Jew could have possibly been prepared for it. There is no interaction with the idea already considered by some Jews in such works as the Wisdom of Solomon that God could be multipersonal in nature. There is no interaction with the idea of Hypostases in the Godhead. Nothing. Buzzard just says it’s staggering. After all, Unitarianism!

In response to Bauckham saying that Paul includes Jesus in the divine nature in his Christianization of the Shema in 1 Cor. 8:4-6, all Buzzard says in response is that if the Shema has God as one person and Paul adds another person, then Paul has indeed added to the Shema. Yeah. Notice that conditional. If the Shema has this. Buzzard nowhere gives an argument that it does. Thus, his reply to Bauckham is “This cannot be because it goes against the position that I already hold.” He never shows how Bauckham is wrong on the grounds of his argument.

In Philippians 2, Buzzard says Paul is telling us to model ourselves after Jesus, but it would be amazing if this was a divine being who decided to become a human. Yes. It would be amazing. And? He also says it’s unrealistic. Are we being expected to model the behavior of an eternal person who became human on Earth?

Yes. Yes, we are.

In Col. 1, we are told Jesus is the Wisdom of God. No bother to interact with intertestamental material on Wisdom. Nothing asking what it would mean if God’s Wisdom was not eternal.  He also asks what would this mean if God says in Isaiah 44 that He created everything alone?

Well, Trinitarians have an answer. Now if you want to say God created with Wisdom, but Wisdom was not a second person of the Godhead, then you have that question to answer. We don’t.

So what of Psalm 110:1? Oh. Well, that verse translates the word apparently as Adoni, which does not mean God, and not Adonai, which would. Never mind that those vowel points were added years later as he himself admits. The Jews were faithful and would know what their texts meant! Breaking news people. Non-Christian Jews hundreds of years after Jesus did not agree that Jesus is fully God and fully man in nature. Shock isn’t it? (Also, watch the debate Buzzard had alongside another Unitarian with James White and Michael Brown where this verse came up.)

Just another example of Buzzard’s poor argumentation.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 5

Did we lose the teaching of Jesus? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I’ve already addressed John 10:36. Now it’s time to deal with John 5:19 which Buzzard uses in two paragraphs and these paragraphs are one right after the other. In this verse, Jesus says He can do nothing of Himself unless it is something He sees His Father doing. Absent from this is how the verse before the author says that Jesus is making Himself equal to God in His claims.

What would Buzzard think Jesus should say otherwise? “I don’t watch the Father do anything! I do what I want!” Of course not! If anything, this is showing a strong unity. The only actions Jesus does is what He sees the Father doing. This is also in reference to healing and doing “work” on the Sabbath, since obviously the Father never walked on Earth and healed on the Sabbath.

Buzzard again also says how easy it would be for Jesus to say “I am God, the second person of the triune Godhead.” Many times, Buzzard seems to indicate He knows why Jesus would not say this, and yet still dishes out the argument. Either he is forgetting what he said in those other places, or he is just being dishonest. You choose. At any rate, this would not have cleared things up. It would have made them more confusing instead!

He also says no Israelite could have remotely imagined reading the Scriptures that the Son of David would have been a member of the Godhead come down in human form. Quite likely! Nor could they have imagined that He would die on a cross for the sins of the world and be raised bodily in the middle of space and time. If Buzzard wants to go this route then, he should cease claiming those events are true as well. However, this argument works when it’s the doctrines Buzzard doesn’t believe in. Convenient, isn’t it?

He also says, another line used repeatedly, that to be the Son of God, you have to be a being who is not God. Very well. Then to be the Son of Man, you have to be a being who is not….oh wait. There’s a problem there. Unfortunately, it’s one Buzzard never brings up. His argument only works if God is unipersonal, which is the very claim under question.

He also says that believing in a being who is God on Earth and a being who is God in Heaven is a problem. Isn’t this two gods? Again, this is still the same assumption of unipersonalism. If this is a problem, what is going on in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:24?

Look it up. You have the name in there twice. The Lord rains down fire and brimstone from the Lord out of Heaven. We are also justified in believing there is still a figure on Earth called the Lord since He was just conversing with Abraham in the prior chapter. (Also noteworthy there were three people who came, but Abraham is said to talk to “the Lord.”)

In looking at the Reformers and the Trinity, Buzzard says they emphasized Paul over Jesus. Even if that is so, does this somehow change the argument? Does Buzzard not think that Paul and Jesus agree? His argument only works if one disagrees with the other.

He talks about Jacob’s wrestling with the angel in Genesis which he says is not repeated in the New Testament. Correct. And? What has that to do with the price of tea in China. He says that the text says Jacob was wrestling with a man, but when Justin Martyr dialogued with Trypho the Jew, who seems stunned by the argument. Go through and read the dialogue some time, Buzzard. Trypho objects to a lot of arguments you would agree to as well. Still, if you go back to Genesis, what does Jacob say? He saw the face of God and lived and he is told by the man “That he has struggled with man and God and prevailed.”

Oh, no. I have no idea where Justin could have got this crazy interpretation he holds! Maybe he just read the text or something?!

Let’s also deal with this argument that God never dies and thus needs to be resurrected. Okay. What does it mean to die? Did Jesus cease to exist? If so, then we have a problem in Col. 1 since it says by Him, all things hold together. If Jesus holds everything together and He ceases to exist….I think you know what happens.

Instead, what if dying just means the soul of Jesus was separated from the body of Jesus? Many Christians think that’s what happens to them when they die, rightly or wrongly. It is a perfectly sensible idea and deals with the problem.

He also says Jesus never demanded worship as God. True enough. However, he also never denied it when it was given Him. He also says Jesus is to be honored in the highest sense, short of making Him equal to God, but Jesus Himself says in John 5:23 that Jesus must be honored just as the Father is honored.

Buzzard also considers the reply of Jesus to the rich young ruler that “No one is good but God alone!” Okay. Buzzard agrees that Jesus is a sinless human being in this chapter. Is a sinless human being not good? Even Adam was said to be good before the Fall. Did he have something Jesus never had? Does Buzzard want to say Jesus is not good?

But wait, if Jesus is good, and no one is good but God alone, then Jesus is…

Does Buzzard want to go there? Does he want to say Jesus isn’t good to defend his position? It seems he has to.

There is a statement also of what it would mean if the three persons took upon themselves a human nature. Yes. That is what he says. No, Buzzard. That did not happen. Only one person took on a human nature. He also sees Galatians 4:4 as saying Jesus came into existence through a woman. We’ll deal more with preexistence later on.

He says the point of the Messiah is he needs to be a Son of David. He can’t be a non-human creature. Good. We agree. The problem? Does he not realize that all Trinitarians say Jesus was fully human?

Reading Buzzard, you sometimes wonder if he really knows what he’s arguing against.

We’ll continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 4

Is it hard to find the Trinity in the Bible? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So at the start, Buzzard has a howler here with saying that the best Trinitarian apologetics can do is find a handful of verses in John and a few in Paul, but no place where God is used to refer to the triune God. I wish I was joking, but I am not. Reading most any Christology would disabuse someone of that notion. Buzzard still has a mindset of Western Consumerism that says something needs to be explicitly stated to be believed.

There is also the idea that the pagan notion of Logos was brought into the Gospel of John. It’s much more rooted in the concept of Wisdom in the Old Testament and the Memra of God, which was also His word, in the Jewish targums, which was a sort of paraphrase of their writings. It’s not a shock to see Buzzard jump to heathenism though.

Next a look at some quotes from Alister McGrath:

The casual reader of Scripture will discern a mere two verses in the entire Bible which seem, at first glance, to be capable of a trinitarian interpretation: Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 13:14 . Both these verses have become deeply rooted in the Christian consciousness… Yet these two verses, taken together or in isolation, can hardly be thought of as constituting a doctrine of the Trinity.

“This is a significant admission.”

The line about an admission is Buzzard’s, but it’s not significant. It’s stating that the whole statement is not found explicitly. That’s the same for many doctrines of Scripture.

The doctrine of the Trinity can be regarded as the outcome of a process of sustained and critical reflection on the pattern of divine activity revealed in Scripture, and continued in Christian experience. This is not to say that Scripture contains a doctrine of the Trinity; rather, Scripture bears witness to a God who demands to be understood in a trinitarian manner. We shall explore the evolution of the doctrine and its distinctive vocabulary in what follows.

To which Buzzard says

There is no doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible, he admits, and yet in its pages, God demands belief in the Trinity.

Make your pick. He’s either being dishonest or ignorant. All McGrath is saying is that the Trinity is not explicitly in Scripture. That is far from saying that it is not in Scripture. Unfortunately, Buzzard doesn’t show any of McGrath’s arguments. I wonder why…..

I find it even more amusing when Tom Harpur is cited later on. Harpur is one who thinks everything is borrowed from paganism and is a journalist. Why is Buzzard using this person as a source?

There is some mention of Murray Harris with his excellent work Jesus as God, but you won’t find in-depth interaction with Harris’s arguments. He also speaks about James White and just says White’s attempts to find the Trinity in the Bible are unconvincing. Again, we are not told what these attempts are so excuse me if this dismissal is, well, unconvincing.

He argues that Hebrews 1: 8 doesn’t work since it would mean God has a God, not explaining how this is a difficulty in Trinitarianism. He doesn’t interact with the last part of that section where the Son is made the agent of creation. He says the Logos in John 1 is not identified with the Son saying the Son only began existing when He appeared in the flesh in John 1:14.

There is also the claim in John 10:33-38 that Jesus refuses the claim He is making Himself equal to God. What Jesus does is a qal wahomer argument in Jewish thinking. We would call it A fortiori. In this, Jesus takes a lesser point and uses it to make a greater point.

Psalm 82 which Jesus references has God saying to wicked people “You are gods.” God then sarcastically says they will die like mere men. Jesus then says “If these wicked people can be called this, how much more can I be called the Son of God?” He doesn’t deny the claim. He intensifies it.

At any rate, this chapter is short because again, Buzzard isn’t giving us more. It’s hard to say a lot when you just say the same thing over and over again.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 3

Is the Trinity dogma? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In this chapter, we’re again going to not bother dealing with the number of times Buzzard repeats the same Shema and Unitarian arguments ad nauseum. Of course, had he eliminated them, this book would be considerably shorter, thus part of my great regret he didn’t. At any rate, in this chapter, Buzzard wants to pit biblical fact against dogma. That’s fine, but I contend the dogma is only on one side.

So at one point, he cites Karen Armstrong on the Trinity saying the makers of the dogma did not intend for the doctrine to be subjected to reasoned analysis.

It’s hard to believe anyone claiming to be taken seriously on church history could think such a thing. I don’t know what got Armstrong to think such a thing if she is being represented accurately and I don’t know why Buzzard would even believe such a thing. These guys were analyzing every single bit of their theology, but their doctrine of God was one they were going to be careless about?

He also says Gregory of Nazianzus considered three men ought to be one since they shared a common humanity. Unfortunately, this is not quoted at all. It’s my understanding that Gregory was asking why that wouldn’t be the case and was responding to that.

He barely touches Matthew 28:19 and 2 Cor. 13:14 just saying that this doesn’t mean the three are one God. On their own? No. In connection with all the other data we have? They certainly help the case. Buzzard has nothing to say about the Matthew reference referring to the singular name of three different persons.

He also says the word God never refers to all three persons. In the Old Testament, I think this would be far more likely. However, with the New Testament, I think the term God is normally referred to the Father and Lord refers to Jesus. There are exceptions, of course, but this seems to be the general principle. If anything, that God has to be given the explanation of, the Father, regularly shows that some differentiation is going on.

Romans 9:5 and 1 John 5:20 are both mentioned, but they are not interacted with. Instead, right after that, lo and behold, Buzzard references the Shema. It’s getting to the point where Buzzard pointing to the Shema is like Mormons pointing to their testimony relentlessly.

He says that for Jesus to say He was God while presenting His Father as God would lead the people to think there were two Gods. I agree with this. Hence, I think if the Trinity is to be revealed correctly, it has to be done slowly and cautiously. Unfortunately, Buzzard never goes down this route.

Buzzard also says the same thing about if Jesus had said “I am God.” However, he says that Jesus’s dependence on God doesn’t make sense. What would He prefer Jesus to say? “I don’t need the Father for anything. I can do whatever I want!” We certainly wouldn’t have a Trinity then.

Buzzard says Christian Theology speaks of God as He and not it, but does the Trinity consider God to be a person? He references Lewis in Christian Reflections saying that Christianity does not believe God to be a person but a Trinity of persons. Lewis says this saying that it’s the same way a cube is not the same as a square. This does not mean that one cannot use singular pronouns when speaking of God though. Buzzard gives no reason to think we can’t.

He also says that the term Echad used in the Shema refers to a one. Yes, but the word echad also refers to a unity one, just as the man and woman become one flesh, even there are definitely two bodies. He also refers to N.T. Wright and the Christianization of the Shema in 1 Cor. 8:4-6. Buzzard doesn’t reply to the arguments but if anything, pits Paul against Jesus.

This is a quite strange path. Are we going to look at Scripture and say what Jesus says is more valid than Paul if we think all of it is God-breathed? If there is no contradiction, then Paul will fully agree with Jesus. Is this what it takes to avoid the Trinity?

He says something about Psalm 110:1, but that’s largely spoken of in a later chapter.

He returns to Wright and the Shema in 1 Cor. 8 but instead of dealing with Wright’s argument, goes to his talking point again and says that Paul sees God as one person in 1 Tim. 2:5 and in Gal. 3:20. Neither of these say God is one person and he even adds in the word person in Gal. 3:20.

He then returns to Wright and says God and Jesus are not Lord in the same sense. Amusingly, he accuses Wright of begging the question, despite how many times Buzzard trumpets the Shema. If we go with Buzzard, then if there is one Lord, then the Father cannot be Lord. Does Buzzard want to go that route? When he gets to Bauckham saying the same thing, Buzzard says this wouldn’t be done since it would violate the creed and adding a person to the Godhead was unthinkable.

But keep in mind, Wright is the one begging the question.

So once again, Buzzard has pretty much one argument consistently. It doesn’t work no matter how many times he repeats it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 2

Who was the God of Jesus? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So we’re continuing our look at Anthony “Have I mentioned the Shema enough” Buzzard’s horrid book. In this second chapter, he’s going to ask who the God of Jesus was. At the start, if you’re an Arian and say Jesus has a God, that’s not going to be a problem to us. Jesus was also a human being who wasn’t an atheist.

So right off, Buzzard tells us that it’s a problem that nowhere in the New Testament does God mean the triune God and that’s a problem. Even if that is true, the response is “So what?” Buzzard doesn’t tell us why this is a problem. If what is being discussed is the relationship between Christ and the Father, then of course we won’t expect the word “Theos” to refer to the Trinity.

He later will say that God is never described as begotten, but Jesus is, which means Jesus had a beginning of His existence. Of course, this entirely begs the question and Buzzard posts this as if no one in church history ever said “Wow. Jesus is begotten! Imagine that!”

Trinitarian relations in understanding have always noted differences in how the persons are. The Son is begotten. The Holy Spirit proceeds. The Orthodox branch of Christianity can disagree with Catholics and Protestants on the filoque, but there is agreement that the Spirit proceeds. Since this is part and parcel of Trinitarian doctrine, it’s hard to see how this is an objection to it.

Here is what the Athanasian Creed says. (Keep in mind Orthodox Churches would disagree with “And the Son” in describing the proceeding of the Holy Spirit, but that is not our focus here.)

The Father was neither made nor created nor begotten; the Son was neither made nor created, but was alone begotten of the Father; the Spirit was neither made nor created, but is proceeding from the Father and the Son.

So here we have something saying the Father is not begotten and saying the Son is and somehow, Buzzard saying the same thing is supposed to be a problem? Also, the writers of the creed didn’t see a problem with the Son being begotten and also being eternal. Either they were all idiots who didn’t recognize a contradiction, or Buzzard is the one who isn’t understanding something. Decisions, decisions….

For those wondering, I view Jesus as begotten in the sense of that which is always in the Father being brought forth from Him. Since God is eternal, this is an eternal activity. The same follows with the Holy Spirit regardless of how many persons in the Trinity were involved.

Continuing in my look, more highlights I have are simply Buzzard making the same claims of Unitarianism over and over. There is a little change when we get to Paul and Buzzard says

Only a very deficient sense of history would permit the impossible notion that Paul believed the God of Israel to have been the Trinitarian God. This is widely admitted.

Unfortunately, Buzzard doesn’t tell us who this is widely admitted by. One wonders what he would think about the things Bart Ehrman would say are widely admitted in New Testament scholarship. There is plenty of scholarship out there anyway that will say Paul did believe in a triune concept of God, but Buzzard is not seriously interacting with that.

He then goes on to quote The New Bible Dictionary.

The Old Testament witness is fundamentally to the oneness of God. In their daily prayer, Jews repeated the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4, 5: “The Lord our God the Lord is one.” In this they confessed the God of Israel to be the transcendent creator without peer or rival. Without the titanic disclosure of the Christ event no one would have taken the Old Testament to affirm anything but the exclusive, i.e., unipersonal monotheism that is the hallmark of Judaism and Islam. Note carefully this candid admission. Reading the Hebrew Bible , on which Jesus was reared and which he affirmed as holy Scripture and which Paul claimed he believed, no one could possibly have imagined God to be more than one divine Person. The Hebrew Bible, says the dictionary, affirmed the unipersonal, non-Trinitarian God. Jesus echoed that affirmation precisely.

First, this can be debated as the intertestamental literature, as pointed out in the Wisdom of Solomon speaks of Wisdom in deified terms. This is not an exception. That being said, is it really a powerful argument to say no one understood it this way until Jesus came?

No, because it’s also true no one understood the Messiah would be born of a virgin (Which I do affirm), grow up among men, live a sinless life, die on a cross as a sacrifice for sins, be buried and raised again bodily in the middle of space and time instead of at the end of the age as would be understood, and would ascend to the right hand of God. Notice in this I didn’t include the deity of Christ since Buzzard wouldn’t agree to that.

So based on Buzzard’s words, since no Jew would have understood that from the Old Testament before, then we should reject it today. That would be nonsense for us. Now that we know the gospel, we can look back and see it there, much like once you know who the criminal is, you can look back on the mystery later and reailze it.

He then quotes someone else who says the Trinity in the New Testament is left implicit and undefined. He says the reader is left to wonder what that means. I could figure it out easily. It means the Trinity is there, but it is not spelled out. It is drawn out from taking the Scripture as a whole and it’s undefined meaning there’s no explicit definition of the Trinity.

He also refers to 1 Cor. 8:4-6. Buzzard is aware of Bauckham’s work, but doesn’t interact with him on this. Bauckham sees this passage as Paul actually putting Jesus in the Shema with the one God being the Father and the one Lord being Jesus. If Bauckham is right, then this totally blows apart Buzzard’s understanding as you have Paul, a devout Jew, seeing Jesus in the divine nature and this early on.

Buzzard later says

Admissions that “language is inadequate” to spell out the Trinity clearly have not prevented the printing of oceans of words attempting to explain the Trinity, using the non-biblical language of Greek philosophy, that the One God of the Bible is three hypostases in one essence, and that the Son of God was, incredibly, “man” but not “a man.” ( Did you know that this is what official Christendom believes?) The Bible nowhere, however, calls God “an essence” and never speaks of “three hypostases.” And any reader of the New Testament should be able to see that Jesus was a man.

This is such a bewildering statement! First, this is what official Christendom believes? Show where. Not just that’s what you think we believe, but show the statement. It doesn’t exist. Finally, we all agree Jesus was a man. Either Buzzard is incredibly ignorant here or he is incredibly dishonest. Neither is good.

He also says Paul had a warning against those trying to define God in terms of philosophy in Colossians 2:8. No. He had a warning against vain philosophy. That’s not the same thing.

So once again, I walk away from Buzzard’s work more convinced. Will anything be remotely persuasive in here? We’ll find out.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: Jesus Was Not A Trinitarian Chapter 1

What is the foundation of Christology? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I don’t know if this one will be as long as the prologue since Buzzard’s whole argument seems to be to reference Mark 12:29, Deut 6:4, and say “Shema” and “Monotheism” over and over. He does reference Ken Samples talking about the importance of the Shema, which all Trinitarians would agree with. At the same time, he does seem to reference Ken Samples as if Samples would agree with him. He would not. I have interviewed Samples and he is indeed an orthodox Trinitarian.

Buzzard does say there is not a word of such revolutionary changes in the nature of God in the New Testament, but this could also be because the idea of a multiplicity in the Godhead was not unfamiliar to the Jews. There is no interaction with the intertestamental literature thus far that I have seen that did inform the Jewish background of Second Temple Judaism Jesus lived in. ONe such work would be the Wisdom of Solomon where Wisdom is presented in terms reminiscent of that of God in passages like the Exodus. I highly encourage readers to read How God Became Jesus. (Unfortunately, my copy is back in Tennessee.)

Buzzard also writes about how a Calvinist pastor once called him a heretic. This is seen as an unloving attitude, but is it? If the pastor really thinks that, is that not more of a warning to Buzzard? We can say all we want that perhaps the tact wasn’t there, but how are we to assume it was done out of an unloving spirit.

Despite this, the next part talks about him speaking and some older ladies in the church come up after his talk and beg he and his family to repent lest they face eternal hellfire. Whatever you think about the doctrine of Hell, I have no doubt the ladies came from a place of love, but Buzzard is apparently upset about that as well. It could just be that Buzzard doesn’t like to be challenged. He also says they seemed unaware of the Unitarian creed (Assumption again) of Jesus and any knowledge of the history of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was absent.

Ah yes. If only those stupid old ladies were as informed as Dr. Buzzard is. They should be grateful that he just graces them with his presence.

When we get to the history of the doctrine, he talks about the controversy after Arius and says that the fact that there was such controversy should alert us that there is a problem. There wasn’t any of this with the doctrine of God in the ministry of Jesus. In this, there is a big question unanswered.

Why were Jews at the time upset about the ministry of the early church following in the footsteps of Jesus? What were Jesus and His followers doing that was so shocking? Buzzard has already said it wasn’t their doctrine of God, so what was it? What created such a scandal? Thus far, I have no idea from Buzzard.

Also, when the Arian controversy started, it wasn’t the Trinity that was the new doctrine bringing about chaos. It was Arianism. In other words, had someone not been upsetting the apple cart, there would have been no controversy. Also, as was said before, there were problems in actions on both sides. Buzzard will only give you one side.

He also writes about how the average Englishman (Which Buzzard is) who believes in the Trinity doesn’t often understand it. So what? For one thing, if you fully understand your doctrine of God, you have a pretty small God. One problem comes with the question of asking if Jesus is God.

While He is, when we say this, we are using shorthand. It is a statement that Jesus fully possesses the nature of God in His being. It does not mean that Jesus is the Father. We are speaking of God in a sense of nature.

Buzzard also says Jesus foresaw a time of killing coming in John 16:2. Why does Buzzard need to look to the Arian controversy? That killing started with Stephen and keep in mind, Buzzard can’t say it was over the doctrine of God by his own position, so what was it?

He also says that in Matthew 16 Jesus could have said about His identity “I am God, and upon this rock, I will build my church.” Sure. That would have solved everything. Then the question would be “Are you the Father?” This is why the understanding of the Trinity was a gradual matter. Jesus had to show who He is and He also had to show He is not the Father. He trusted us to work it out.

Buzzard actually knows this because he says the same thing when replying to Witherington. He goes a step further and says that any claim to be the God of Israel would have been nonsensical. No Jew would understand it. First off, if that’s the case, then it’s obvious why Jesus didn’t say it. Second, would it be nonsensical? Buzzard has not told us why. He has just assumed it.

The final section has Buzzard saying that the creed was unitarian and thus if Jesus was said to be God, then there would have to be two gods since God is unipersonal. Thus, Buzzard’s assumption that the Shema is Unitarian, which he has not demonstrated, drives his doctrine. We all agree that if God is unipersonal, then two persons cannot be God. The question is “Is God unipersonal?” I can fully say I agree with the Shema. How could I not? I just don’t agree with Buzzard’s interpretation of it.

We will continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)