Torah Times Messianic Ministry

How Scripture Teaching differs from Classic Trinitarianism

For those who need to be assured, I will arrive at the correct conclusion before I get to it, Messiah Yeshua, by his divine nature, is the co-creator of all things, being Almighty in union with the Almighty. Also, whenever the Spirit of the Almighty is referred to as distinct from Messiah, the Spirit is assumed under the final use of the word Almighty in the previous sentence. And also, whenever Messiah's Father is referred to as distinct from Messiah, he is assumed under the final use of the word Almighty in the same sentence. But whenever we may refer to the Most High as "our Father" or as Spirit," we may comprehend the Messiah in his glorified state as included. Messiah also, of course, shares human nature with us.

This statement obviously does not reveal everything, but it should satisfy  the faithful who read Scripture and want reassurance. The point is not to define or formulate everything, but to assure the faithful that I do not deny anything that is important or critical. It is not going to satisfy those committed to traditional creeds like the Nicene Creed, which is classic Trinitarianism, because I have left out phrases like "three in one" and "begotten before all worlds," "one essence," and "one substance." For those who must use such phrases and words, none of these come from Scripture, either in exact phrases or in concepts that should be described by these phrases.

Concerning Classic Trinitarianism, I will say that one may try to defend the truth based on the creed, or one can defend the truth based on Scripture apart from the creed. If one does the former, then one will be projecting the creed onto Scripture and will end up reinterpreting Scripture to fit the creed. I will demonstrate sufficient contradictions between the Creed and Scripture to show that projecting the creed onto Scripture should not be our approach.

There are many who "deny the Trinity," quote unquote, because the doctrine includes the deity of Messiah. There are many who deny it because they believe God is one being, one entity, one person, as Judaism does, and the Trinity allows more than one person. And finally, there are many who deny the Trinity just because they want to be different from Christians who espouse the creed. These reasons are all the wrong reasons, as can be guessed from my assurance statement above. Attacking the Trinity doctrine has become a proxy for denying real biblical truth.

So when I say I am going to dismantle the doctrine of the Trinity, I am speaking of other things, and not denial of the biblical truths that "denying the Trinity," quote unquote, has become a proxy for. I should note that in every debate over the Trinity I have ever witnessed or contributed to, there are only two sides talking to each other by virtue of the weight of their numbers. They are the credalists and those who deny the Trinity for all the wrong reasons. But anyone who enters the debate based on Scripture alone is immediately sidelined. It is then completely frustrating to see these two parties going at it. And frankly, it means that no effective dialogue can be conducted. Whenever one may wish to help the creedalist with their argument because the anti-trinitarian has made a good point, the creedalist will ignore it because the creedalist immediately identifies the help coming from a non-creedalist. To me, this proves that their loyalty to the creed is greater than their loyalty to the word of God.

The same thing also occurs in the debate between Judaism and Christianity. Jews only debate Christians who are easy marks, and Christians only debate Jews who are easy marks. People falsely imagine that there are only the two choices represented by the two sides. But there is a third way, the way of Scriptural truth.

Once the creed has been dismantled, the way will be open to explore actual biblical revelations of the nature of the Most High. But I am not going to go far down that road here because my initial purpose is to remove the roadblock from the way.

I will begin with the doctrine of the "eternal generation of the Son." It was this doctrine that Michael Servitus denied. Servitus did not deny that the person who became the Son was God. He just denied the eternal generation of the son and would not say "eternal son." So for this, John Calvin had him murdered. So they burned him at the stake for heresy.

Let's explain it this way: If I say that my father went to High School in the town of Quincy in Washington State, then it would be correct to say my father was not a father then because he had not yet married my mother. Yet, I refer to my father by the title that he gained afterward. This anachronistic use of titles is accepted everywhere. In fact, I did so in my assurance statement above. I used the title Messiah to refer to the one who became Messiah later. So we refer to the Almighty Son before he became the Son. And then technically, the one who became the Son cannot be an "eternally generated" Son. Or, as the creed puts it, "begotten before all ages."

The Scripture has something to say about the matter:

The text speaks of the anointed king David and also of the greater Anointed, Messiah Yeshua. In Acts 13:33, the words are applied to Yeshua. The words "this day" refer to a time when the Son was given the title and position of the Son.[1] And so naturally, the Son cannot be begotten before all ages. Begotten means that something is born. The title and position of sonship were born in time, but not the person who became the Son, who has no beginning of days.[2] To speak of eternal birthing is a contradiction. Every birth occurs at a certain point in time.

The creed runs thus, "τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων" (the son of God, the only begotten, the one from the Father begotten before all the ages) AD 381 version. This version was adopted by nearly all the Churches, Eastern and Western.

In a bit, we will see that "only begotten" is a mistranslation. But if we suppose that it means that, then it would clearly refer to the title of the Son being begotten in time, as in Psalm 2:7, or to his being begotten in the flesh in the virgin birth. If this is the case, then the creed is redefining "only begotten" to mean "begotten before all ages."

But there is a deeper more nefarious reason that μονογενῆ has been mistranslated "only-begotten" and then redefined from even a common sense use of the mistranslation into the contradiction "begotten before all ages," and this has to do with a combination of Greek philosophy and the influence of Judaism in the Church.

Over time, Judaism has hardened its opinion of the divine nature in response to Christianity, so as to disallow the divine nature of the Messiah. Judaism's position reached its final codification under Maimonides. But before then, the codified opinions had an increasing influence on Christianity. These opinions were seized upon by the Arians, the party that denied the deity of the Messiah. For these reasons, the doctrine that was adopted at the Council of Nicea was a combination of Greek Philosophy and the one being doctrine taking over Judiasm. It was a compromise and not a statement of pure biblical teaching.

At Nicea, a "one being" or "one essence" theology was adopted, and this is why the Son is said to be a generation of the one essence. This hearkens back to a philosophy that is acceptable to Judaism, and that is that God is one being with many manifestations. Of course, Christianity tried to define the doctrine to allow plural persons that were more than just manifiestations, which they branded as the modalistic heresy. Then, rather than try to defend this logically, they called the multiple persons and one being doctrine a mystery.   Likewise, the eternal generation doctrine was deemed a mystery.  But as we shall see, it is based on a false translation.

The connection to Greek theology comes through the many Christian theologians that were immersed in Greek philosoophy and who brought it into the Church. The place we want to look is the Pythagorean doctrine of the Monad. The idea of the monad was influencing their thinking. The same thinking occurs in physics today among those who are looking for one grand, unified equation that explains the whole universe. The Pythagoreans used the monad to explain the evolution of mathematics, and they considered it divine. As such, the idea of the monad is an ancient idolatry.

Turning the Tables

Exposing the flaw of the eternal generation doctrine, as I have done above, does not just overturn eternal generation. It also overturns the monad philosophy, the idea that the divine is "one being." I will deal with so-called scripture arguments that God is one being later. The eternal generation doctrine was established on understanding the Greek word mono-genes to mean "only begotten." But scholars have discovered that the word does not mean "only begotten." The term means "only one of like kind, or "only kindred." As such, the word threatens to destroy both eternal generation and the monad doctrine. Because now we would have to say that the Son is of like essence to his Father, not the same essence.

When the true meaning of "monogenes" was recovered, the scholarly world compromised to cover up the error and its consequences. In the 1950s, they quietly removed the translation "begotten" from the Bible versions. So now the passages read "only Son" rather than "only begotten Son." All you have to do is compare the KJV to the ESV in John 3:16. This created an additional problem that has not gone unnoticed in the ESV at John 1:18. Bart Ehrman noticed that it says the Son is the "only God." The compromise was to understand that MONOGENES meant "only kindred" at the scholarly level but to fail to translate KINDRED in the newer versions. The reason for this is that allowing the translations to say "only kindred" would blow up the Nicene Creed, which declared that the Son was an eternal generation of the one essence. Replacing this with its correction would say that the Son was the only kindred to the Father before all ages, which is to say he is of like kind in divinity to his Father and not the same being.

Often when a criminal seeks to cover up a crime, they end up exposing the crime in the act of covering it up. This is what has happened with MONEGENES. By updating the translations the way they do, omitting a translation of GENES they are implicating the Creed. What is more important, however, is that the actual meaning of the term "only kindred" demolishes the same substance doctrine, the homoousion, the same being doctrine. And thus the core of the Nicene creed is demolished on both ends, the one being doctrine and the eternal generation doctrine.

Later I will debunk the claims made that the Scripture teaches Elohim is one being, but for now I will close with John 17:3, which gives us the reality:

The Son is alone true Almighty, and his Father is alone true Almighty. This does not prevent the Spirit from being alone true Almighty either, though it is not mentioned in this text. What the text is saying is that the Son is alone true Almighty without generation or dependence on the Father. He is independently Almighty, alone kindred to the Father. Only when the Son limits himself to his humanity is he dependent on the Father.

So to explain MONOGENES, we have to explain the MONO aspect with respect to men and with respect to the Father. With respect to men, it is "only" kindred, because only in the Son does the divine become man, sharing kinship with man. In terms of both man and God, he is the "only kindred" in a combined sense, being the only kindred Almighty to man. But in the scope of only his relation to the Father and the Spirit, he is the "alone kindred" Almighty, as described in John 17:3, and not the only kindred Almighty to the Father, because that would leave out the Spirit.

If the Son is only a generation of the Father, then this logically denies his diety, which Ellicot's Commentary appears to do:

Meyer's Commentary, who is supposed to hold to the deity of Messiah, actually denies it at John 17:3 based on the Nicene Creed:

But Meyer is wrong about 1 John 5:20 and Romans 9:5. Here is what the Good News of Messiah says:

The only sensible solution to John 17:3 is that the word MONO means "alone," and asserts the independent deity of the Father, and the independent deity of the Son. Just a few verses earlier, back in chapter 16, MONO is used in the sense of "alone," meaning by onself. But the Nicene Creed made the proper understanding of the text impossible by moving the Father to the position of the "one essence" and making the Son an eternal generation of the Father. After accepting the lying creed, there is no longer any way to understand the Son as having independent Deity.

Augustine could not defend the Greek text as is, so he reworded the passage so that it was compliant with the Nicene Creed, "That they may know Thee and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent, as the only true God."

The John  17:3 Greek text as is, asserts either that the Father only is true Almighty or that the Father alone is true Almighty, and the Son also. The first option denies the diety of the Son. The second option denies both parts of the Nicene Creed, the homoousion and eternal generation, but it maintains the independent deity of both Father and Son and allows the Spirit to be independent deity also. Since the context of Scripture teaches the deity of the Son, it follows that it teaches the independent deity of the Son.

When I say independent Deity, I mean that the Son does not depend on the Father to "maintain" his Deity. That's what eternal generation would suggest. When saying that the Father is independent Deity, this is not a claim about being a being in the sense of the human term "being." And the same goes for the Spirit. Saying the Spirit is independent Deity is not to assert that the Spirit is a being in a human sense. No comment is made on the complexity or simplicity of the beingness of the Spirit or Father or Son in reference to his divine nature. No comment is made upon the divisions or multiplicty of the being of the Father or the Spirit or Son in his divine nature. No comment is made on the permanence of any structure the Most High may assume either. But since the Son became man, we can say in that case that the Almighty Son has taken on the beingness of a human by choice, and in this case the human term being does apply. But in his divine nature we do not know.

To assert that the Scripture teaches God is one being, in the human sense of being, is to make a claim the Scripture does not make. It is an attempt to describe the unseen God using a human anthropological term. Since Scripture does not state this, it is idolatry to assume it. It is to create an image of God in the form of human anthropology. Other human terms are ascribed to God in Scripture, such as thoughts, love, various feelings, etc., but not "being" in the sense of the construction of the human mind or spirit. God's nature is described in many ways in Scripture, but a spiritual "structure" of God is not described.

The anthropological term "he" and other pronouns

In Hebrew, the third-person, masculine, singular pronoun "he" often refers to the Most High. The Most High also speaks with a singular "I" and "My." Often enough, Hebrew uses singular pronouns anthropomorphically. For example, the nation of Edom can be referred to as "he," and Israel can speak collectively with "I" or possessively with "my." Babylon can speak with "I." Therefore, if we do not already know the nature of the entity referred to by the singular pronoun, we cannot conclude from the singularity of the pronoun that the nature of the entity referred to is a singular person or a collection of persons. Likewise, we can conclude nothing from a singularly conjugated verb unless we already know the nature of the entity referred to based on other statements.

So reasoning from singular grammar to a "one being" doctrine is simply circular reasoning. It is the projection of human assumptions onto the language, contrary to precedents already set, that calls into question the assumption when the nature of the entity referred to is not already known.

Not even stating "there is one God" is helpful in defining God as one being. It is no more helpful than saying there is "One nation" to which we are loyal. Only by a process of circular reasoning is one being found in such statements.

So when God speaks and says, "I am he, and there is no other Almighty," this is in the same class as when a nation says, "I am the Empire, and there is no other power." This is because when the Almighty proposes to create man, he refers to himself as "us." So we have the additional statement. The people of earth said, "Let us build a city." The Almighty said, "Let us confuse their language." So Almighty and people are words in the same class that refer to a more specific reality made up of "us."

There is more to be said on this subject in specific texts, but I will return to the theme of the Nicene Creed since that is the present topic. The Nicene Creed began in AD 325 but was expanded or explained in AD 381 at a subsequent council. The Creed uses the word homoousion," which means "one-being" or "same essence," but has also been put down as "one substance." The term does not occur in Scripture at all. In fact, it appears to have been borrowed from the Gnostics.

Also, the Creed's interpretation of "only begotten Son" to mean "begotten before all ages" rather than "only kindred Son" is based on a false derivation of the word MONOGENES.  The one essence doctrine and the eternal generation doctrine have every appearance of being points of Greek philosophy in which the divine is reduced to an utterly simple and undifferetiated unity, or monad, and any differentiations are related to it as projections, the dyad. I shall say that this idea is as crass and idolatrous as making a sphere and saying it is God and then casting a shadow three ways from it and saying the shadows are god projections.

The simple observation of the changes put into the translations in the 1950's in John 3:16 and John 3:18 and other passages with MONOGENES exposes the lie in the Nicene Creed. GENES does properly mean "kindred" or "of like kind," being the same word as "genus," "of the same kind. " In no way is the word related to "to give birth" or "beget." This truth destroys any authority of the Nicene Creed. And further, it also destroys the homoousion doctrine because MONOGENES does not suggest "same essence." It suggests "similar essence." So the Church perverted the meaning of MONOGENES and borrowed a word from the Gnostics to force upon Christendom the opinions of men contrary to the Scripture. So in conclusion, the creed is without authority.

The idolatry does not end there, though. From this fountainhead flows classic theism, which proposes that God is without emotion, "impassionate," and unchangeable in an absolute sense, and not just a moral sense. This image of God, painted in the mind by the Church, comes between Christians and the true knowledge of the Most High in Scripture, where a personal Almighty is revealed, forgiving and compassionate, but who will not declare the guilty in the right. Revealed there is an Almighty who does not conform himself to the "structure" of human imagination but who reveals himself and his nature in his interactions with humanity and his special people, Israel.

I initially learned about the mistranslation of MONOGENES by reading Appendix 6 in Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology. While the appendix shows what it does not mean, it does not clearly show what it does mean. But I realized quickly that it meant "only kindred." I discovered via a variant reading that John 5:44 reads, "You are not seeking the Glory that is from the side of the only kindred Almighty." As MONOGENES does not refer to the Son here, it is clear that "only begotten Almighty" would be nonsense. It is further clear that the other MSS are wrong because they would require the translation "the Glory that is beside the only God," which would imply that the Glory beside the only God wasn't God. To solve this, the translations try to change the Greek word παρὰ to mean "from" instead of "from beside" or "beside." (John 1:1 reads "next to the Almighty." ) Lee Irons of the ETS (Evangelical Theological Society) tried to overturn the evidence against "only begotten," and I have read his summary. He convinced Grudem to reverse his opinion and affirm the doctrine of "eternal generation." It is clear to me that "only kindred" works in every example he supplies, but he does not recognize this meaning, and leaves the reader to assume a very awkward translation if the choice is to be other than "only begotten." This amounts to a straw man argument because he is not using the plain sense "only kindred" in testing the TLG texts to see if they make sense with the proper alternative to "only begotten." For this reason, his argument is deceptive.

John 1:18 reads in the better MSS, MONOGENES THEOS, only kindred Almighty, but if this is to be translated only begotten God then it is clearly nonsense. Both as the Son and as a man, Yeshua was begotten in time. His status as Son began in time. But his divinity has no beginning. So to speak of "the only begotten God" is nonsense. If begotten is to have any sense, it must refer to his physical birth or to the Father giving him the status of Son. But everlasting divinity is not begotten. If it is, then it is only a demi-god. So the meaning is "only kindred Almighty."

 

Messianic Teachers are not yet clear of the Nicene error. Tim Hegg (also a member of ETS), for instance, teaches that "the Word was God expresses His absolute oneness with the Father" (The Deity of Yeshua, Jan. 2007). Here he is teaching the homoousion doctrine. But the John 1 text actually teaches a common divine nature, not that the Messiah and His Father are the same being. The Good News of Messiah reads, "And the Word has been next to the Almighty. And Almighty the Word has been." The Word and the Almighty are not the same being. To say the Word is Almighty is to ascribe a divine nature to the Word, not the same shared essence. Many scholars have pointed out that "the Almighty" and the subsequent "Almighty" are not an equation of divine persons but an assertion of common divine attributes. So Hegg's argument doesn't succeed in getting this text to support the Nicene Creed. The faithful need to face up to the fact that we have been taught lies by the Church and Synagogue.

The Gnostic Origin of "Only Begotten"

The proper translation of MONOGENES is "only kindred." The word occurs in 10 places, Luke 7:12, "only kindred son," Luke 8:42, "only kindred daughter," Luke 9:38, "only kindred," John 1:14, "only kindred,"  John 1:18, "only kindred Almighty," John 3:16, "only kindred Son," John 3:18, "only kindred Son," John 5:44, "only kindred Almighty," 1 John 4:9, "the only kindred," and Heb. 11:17. In this last passage, it is said that Isaac is the "uniquely kindred" son of Abraham, or "only kindred" within the degree of kinship required, namely that Isaac was the loved son. The Hebrew text gives an equivalent sense: "your only son whom you have loved." The additional restriction is that Isaac is the one Abraham loved because he did not send him away like Ishmael. Ishmael was disinherited, leaving Isaac as the unique kindred, the one-of-a-kind kindred, who would inherit. But if "only begotten" is proposed in Hebrews 11:17, then it turns into a contradiction because both Ishmael and Isaac were begotten by Abraham! So MONOGENES means an only kindred within the required degree of kinship, and not "only begotten."

 

But even though MONOGENES propertly derives from the Greek word GENOS (γενος, kind) and not the verb GENNAO (γενναω, give birth), there is a great overlap between situations. Very often, the "only kindred" or "one-of-a-kind kindred" turns out to be the only begotten. But in other cases, the other kindreds died, and it was the only kindred that was left. It would be improper then to speak of the only kindred left as an only begotten. In other cases, such as Abraham and Isaac, the kinship itself had to be of a special nature, i.e., "uniquely kindred." The Son is an "only kindred Almighty" (or uniquely kindred Almighty) to the Father in his bosom (John 1:18). But he is not a "begotten Almighty."

But the Gnostics had a predisposition to overlook clear distinctions in language in order to pervert the text. For example, Valentian Gnostics interpreted John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word," as "The beginning" itself being "the Word." And now they claimed that "the beginning" is when the word came into existence, since in their view the beginning is the Word. They were very clever with their interpretive tricks, reducing the literal to pure symbolism and raising the symbolic to literalness in order to extract a sense contrary to the plain sense. And this is what they subjected MONOGENES to. By improper equivocation to GENNAO they interpreted it to mean "only begotten," or specially begotten. They denied the deity of the Son by making him a begotten deity, no better than a "demi-god."

So it was by Gnostic interpretation that "only begotten" spread throughout Christendom in the second and third centuries BC, in which Gnostics were in the vast majority, and they could get ordinary Christians to accept it under the guise that its surface interpretation would refer to Messiah's physical begetting of a Virgin. But in the interpretation for initiates, it would be used to teach the begetting of deity, a thoroughly idolatrous notion. The Gnostics are well known to have various levels or stages of disciples.

So when the more orthdox party predictably reacted against the Gnostic teaching of a "generated deity," they were duped by the fact that the Gnostics and Arians had already contaminated the term MONOGENES. Their counterargument took the form of "eternal generation" in order to restore Messiah to the status of everlasting deity.  They were also duped by the Arians, under the influence of Judaism and the Greek monad philosophy, into adopting the homoousion doctrine, a term also taken over from the Gnostics. From this amalgamation of errors proceeds the Nicene Creed.

So then, Messiah Yeshua, his Father, and the Spirit sent to us are individually Almighty. They are one is a sense we do not yet understand, and one is a sense that we have some understanding of, because Messiah wanted us to be one as he and his Father were one. The Son is not generated from the Father, nor the Spirit. Nor should we speak of the mysterious aspect of divine oneness as homousion, one substance, one essence, or one being. For that is to say what we do not know. And to ascribe a human concept to God that Scripture doesn't teach is idolatry. There is "One Almighty" but we should not presumed that this means "one being." Further, to speak of One Almighty does not prohibit from speaking of plural Almighties contained in the concept of One Almighty. For Abraham stated, "The Almighties caused me to wander from my father's house."

I know adversaries will accuse me of some form of polytheism, but this only comes by first defining the theism part of monotheism as "one essence," or homoousion, theism. But, as I pointed out before, that is circular reasoning. But they will insist on it nonetheless. However, circular reasoning is not biblical reasoning.

Notes

[1] A viewer comment calls for clarification. Thinkers tend to equivocate about the various uses of "son," but there are several uses: (1) to denote genetic origin by birth. In this sense of sonship, Yeshua's sonship has a beginning: (2) to denote an authoritative status in subordination to higher authority. This sense is that of "representative." In this sense of son, Yeshua also made a beginning, the point of Psalm 2:7, and (3) to denote kinship, or a nature of like kind. This last category pertains to such phrases as "Son of the Almighty," "sons of the prophets," or "son of might." A son of might means "a warrior," that is, one who shares kinship, like nature, with warriors. So in this sense, "son of the Almighty" is the same as saying "of kin nature to the Almighty," that is, Almighty. And this is why I often translate "Almighty Son" to give the sense of the Hebrew more accurately. In this sense, the Son is everlasting. This use of son does not imply genetic origin, generation, or dependence. It only implies kindred nature. The meanings may overlap in some uses since at present, Messiah fits all three of these definitions. Also we may use this threefold sense anachronistically, but it must be realized that only the implication of definitions 1-2 is an anachronism. The last definition was always true.

I have to take care not to let opponents of the truth put words into my mouth by exploiting ignorance of the distinctions in the various uses. It's a form of straw man argument to try to paint the opposition into a corner by appearing to say something that is not true. Often, if you read adversarial comments, you will find them misrepresenting what I said or meant, and often this is just slander to try to turn people away. This is why you should never believe anything an adversary writes, says, or implies about an opponent before reading or hearing what I actually stated. Most often, adversaries don't start with the question, "Did you really mean to say that?" Nor do adversaries wish to give one a chance to correct a minor error when they are attacking the main teaching. But rather, they will invent the minor error to attack the main teaching. I'll admit to not being semantically perfect, but being enemies, they give no quarter to explain, nor generally do they ask!

[2] The phrasing here was somewhat of a faux pas. I simply meant no beginning, and did not mean to cite Micah 5:2. Micah 5:2 properly states, "And goings forth of him [are] from aforetime, from days of old." This text refers to the visitations of the Messenger of YHWH. The argument for the everlasting pre-existence of the "Messenger" is to be made from the constant identification of the Messenger as YHWH, and not from the time language in Micah 5:2. The same phrase "days of old" is used in Micah 7:14 with no evident reference to eternity.