Back in 2017 I challenged Dr. James White to a debate. Now, God willing, it will happen, thanks to the efforts of host church Pastor Evan McClanahan. I am delighted to say that Unitarian Christian Alliance is co-sponsoring this debate. For those who can’t attend or catch the church’s livestream, you will eventually be able to see it on our excellent YouTube channel. Our topic will not be the Trinity, but rather the deity of Christ, in the form of the debate question Dr. White has chosen: “Is Jesus Yahweh?”
I’ve been in a similar debate before (video, soon-to-be-reprinted book). In that debate I argued that a unitarian Christology is easily stated in the very words of Scripture, whereas any “two natures” theory depends on questionable inferences from what is actually written. I urged that my opponent Mr. Date was “reading between the lines,” whereas I was just reading the lines. I began by pointing out the obvious numerical distinctness of Jesus and God, summarized the clear New Testament teachings that Jesus is a very special man who is someone other than the one true God (a.k.a. the Father), and then explained the desperate morass which is traditional catholic “two natures” speculations.
My approach will be different here. Dr. White has since his 1998 book endlessly hurled the accusation that every advocate for unitarian Christianity is “merely assuming” unitarianism and/or “merely assuming” that the human Jesus isn’t also divine. So I will argue in a style that undeniably does not assume such things. I will argue from more than a dozen facts about the New Testament, or rather classes of facts, each of which confirms the hypothesis that the authors believed that Jesus is a man who is not also divine over the hypothesis that they believed Jesus to be a “godman” (i.e. both human and divine). Dr. White has over the years urged that clearly it is “Philosophy” and not the New Testament which determines my views about God and Christ. But I will present a case for a non-divine, human Jesus which does not assume any controversial philosophical theses and which is based on a broad view of the whole New Testament, focusing on the many clear passages, and I will expose the many unjustifiable assumptions of Dr. White’s arguments for “the deity of Christ,” or as he prefers to say, that Jesus “is Yahweh.”
Tickets are available here; get them while they last!
Tune in April 2, Sunday night at 7pmCST for our very own Dr. Dustin Smith and Pastor William Barlow defending unitarianism and the true humanity of Jesus in a debate on the Gospel Truth youtube channel.
You can support our debaters by sharing the link widely on social media, watching live, winsomelyparticipating in the youtube chat, and reaching out to encourage Dustin and Will. Please pray for God’s provision for all involved, and that the debate will contribute to the spread of the truth about the one true God, and the human Christ Jesus.
If you would like to participate in future debates, as debater, pit crew, behind the scenes support, or in other ways, please contact me at media@unitarianchristianalliance.org. Many hands make light work, and there is a massive work to be done indeed!
That’s the topic of this recent online debate between UCA member Dr. Dustin Smith and evangelical apologist Kelly Powers. Check it out:
In this post I offer a few quick thoughts after watching it. Most importantly, I thought Dr. Smith did a good job of laying out the strong case that the God of the OT is a single self, a someone, one “person” or intelligent agent. This is based on the whole way that these books refer to the one God, using singular verb forms, adjectives, titles, nouns, pronouns, and so on. He might have also added that the function of a personal proper name like “Yahweh” is to refer to a single person, and that the very concept of a god is the concept of a certain sort of self (i.e. a being with intellect and will, who does things for reasons). And also, in the OT God is sometimes portrayed as a human-like figure, which is a natural way of portraying God as a single self. It’s fair to say that specialists in OT theology, unlike popular apologists and a few other scholars, generally agree that the OT God is a single self. In addition to the sources cited by Dr. Smith, we could add the verdict of evangelical scholar and specialist in OT theology Dr. John Walton:
No Trinity . . . In the Old Testament, God’s revelation centered on the idea that there was one God as opposed to a community of gods. The metaphysical models that would make trinitarianism meaningful simply do not exist in the Israelite cultural context. In some passages in the Old Testament, [trinitarian] Christians can look back and catch glimpses of some nascent trinitarianism, but such hindsight interpretations cannot be construed as a revelation of God in the Old Testament context and do not factor into the theology of the Old Testament.
Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief, 287-89.
Against this, Mr. Powers really only pointed a few unusual OT texts which arguably are consistent with God being multi-personal. But that’s not really an argument for his claim that the OT teaches God to be multipersonal, nor does it engage with the evidence pointed out by Dr. Smith. Mr. Powers gets distracted on the irrelevant point that the NT (allegedly) teaches Jesus’s pre-human existence. He seems never to have heard of illeism, and Powers’ Google-answer that the “plural of majesty” only starts being used in the high middle ages is . . . well, obviously mistaken. The plural of majesty appears in the 7th c. AD Qur’an. And Dr. Smith pointed out that it occurs in some much earlier Jewish writings as well. Powers clearly over-reaches in asserting that the OT clearly teaches that God is multipersonal.
I’m not sure why both debaters dismiss the fairly popular scholarly suggestion that in texts like Genesis 1:26 God is supposed to be addressing his “divine council.” But I suppose that since it is natural for a king or emperor to speak both for himself and for his court or administration, maybe it’s not easy to tell the difference between his doing that, and his self-magnification by using the royal “we.”
Powers, unfortunately, tries to get some trinitarian mileage out of the fact that something called echad (Hebrew for “one”) may be a compound thing, something composed of parts, e.g. one family, one bunch of grapes, or one pile of rocks. Well, sure. But we unitarian Christians are not saying that anything which is echad is simple (partless); that’s no part of our case that OT theology is unitarian.
I appreciated how Dr. Smith brought out the fact that no OT God-word was then understood to refer to a Trinity or three “Persons.” If you think about it, it’s incredible that this would be so if, as some apologists claim, these authors are thinking of God as a Trinity.
Overall, it’s a substantial and respectful debate. Powers planted his flag on there being no explicit unitarian OT text, in other words, a text which says in so many words that “God is a single self” (or, as Powers oddly says, a single “personage”). But a teaching needn’t be explicit to be clear; implications are often very clear. And using proper names, singular person pronouns, a singular verb tenses – that is how human language express the assumption that the thing in question is a self. A reader who only had the OT could only conclude that the unique God is a single someone, even though sometimes prophets and angels speak in the first-person on his behalf.
Popular apologetics is riddled nowadays with misinformation about Old Testament theology. I hope Dr. Smith continues to shine the lights of common sense and good scholarship onto this subject.
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