Saturday, June 20, 2020

The Trinity and the Divine Son from Heaven

Oneness Pentecostals are very difficult to pin down on their doctrine. They will profess something at one moment, and then vociferously deny it the next.

One thing that I have seen them assert is that the deity of Jesus is the Father in Heaven, while the Son was His humanity on earth. Therefore, the Son began with His conception in the womb of Mary. That means, depending on how you look at that assertion, that they either deny the deity of the Father, making Him Jesus instead, or they deny the deity of Jesus, making Him nothing more than a vessel for the Father. I should say that Oneness deny both of those implications. However, they also deny the applicability of logic to their doctrine. It is just "human reasoning," they claim. The principles of logic violated by their doctrines are the Law of Non-Contradiction, which states that a thing and its contrary cannot both be true at the same time and in the same way, and the Law of Identity, which states that a thing must be itself, not something else, again at the same time and in the same way.

In John 6:62, that apostle quotes these words of Jesus: "Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before?" They apply very specifically to the matter at hand. Jesus says that He was in heaven before His incarnation. Oneness claim that this is a reference to His deity as the Father. However, He explicitly refers to Himself as the Son in this verse, not the Father. Here is where the laws of logic apply: Oneness deny the Law of Identity by making Him something other than what He is -and says that He is - to avoid the implications of this verse. And they violate the Law of Non-Contradiction by making Him the Son and the Father at the same time, in violation of their own doctrine. I should repeat, however, that these logical problems don't bother Oneness, because they consider logic to be "human reasoning." 

In contrast, the Trinitarian violates neither rule. Since orthodox Christians hold that the Son has always been the Son, never the Father, both divine Persons keep their respective identities without contradiction. The Son was in Heaven from eternity as the Son. With Him was the Father, as the Father from eternity, just as we are told in John 1:1. Thus we maintain the full deity of both Father and Son, sacrificing neither in order to maintain a manmade doctrine.

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