This is how I see the various views on Christology. The first two on top are within typical evangelical Christian orthodoxy because they both claim that Jesus is God. There is some dispute about how heretical the other view is, but my impression is that when they’re talking about something as fundamental as the nature of God, it’s pretty serious.
What happens a lot in this debate is a confusing of what the other side is saying. Trinity is not saying polytheism, and Oneness is not saying that Jesus is not God. They will also try to get the other side to go down the road to their more radical counter-parts. Perhaps they think that their debate opponents haven’t fully realized what they’re saying, but the philosophy itself is or leads to their more radical counter-parts. And one of the things that I’m trying to say with this Venn Diagram is that trinity and oneness are distinct from their radical counter-parts. There is no road from one to the other.
One way of looking at it is that Trinitarians and Oneness people don’t actually disagree on Jesus or the Holy Spirit. What they dispute is whether the God is the Father in a synonymous way, or of the Father in his entirety is part of God, but distinct from other parts.
Trinitarians also affirm that the trinity existed before creation. They will oftentimes use this to explain the pluralistic language in which God is referred to in the Genesis creation story. Of course, the Israelites knew the story and they did not affirm the trinity. Did the writer of Genesis not explain this? Was it just a big mystery to them why God is referred to in a pluralistic sense? A mystery which was only revealed to the author of Genesis? Wouldn’t their understanding of it just be polytheism? The rest of the Old Testament is referred to God in the singular. Why the change?
Oneness people tend to affirm that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were created not creators. They appeared at a point in time. This is reconciled with still being God by being created not ex-nihilo, but created out of God. But if Jesus was not creator, in what sense was he God in the Oneness view? He didn’t have omniscience or eternality. According to popular theism, he was good in that he maintained moral perfection. But in their view of the afterlife, all maintain moral perfection, so that doesn’t make one into God. He wasn’t unchanging. He wasn’t immaterial.
In fact if we want to attribute God with the property of unchanging, then how did he change into a man? Is God only partly unchanging? Trinitarians can say that since Jesus pre-existed creation, that he never changed. But Jesus became flesh. To become flesh from non-flesh is to change. Jesus changed from alive to dead in the crucifixion, and then alive again in resurrection.
When we begin listing attributes of God, they all belong to the father. So in the Trinitarian view in what way is the father not entirely God?
Jesus said that he and the father are one, but what he must have meant is that they are one God, but he and the father are distinct parts. Jesus is not the father, and the father is not Jesus in the Trinitarian view, even if they are both God.
A lot of problems.
