Theology in the Raw - 783: #783 - Trinitarianism Versus Unitarianism? A Conversation with Chris Date and Sam Adams

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

In this different sort of podcast, Preston moderates a discussion between Chris Date (Trinitarian) and Sam Adams (Unitarian) about whether God is three in one or just one. Sam argues that there’s one God and Jesus and the Spirit are not that God, while Chris Date believes that God is Trinity--three persons of one divine essence. And both argue from the text of Scripture for their view. Sam Adams is a born and raised Biblical Unitarian but has attended trinitarian evangelical churches for the last 12 years. He has a bachelors degree from Cornell University and a masters degree from Harvard University both in biostatistics. He works in data science and artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry. He has published many peer reviewed articles on subjects completely unrelated to theology. He is a highly-engaged and self-educated lay person on the topics of Unitarianism, Trinitarianism, church history, and related theological subjects. While he has never been called a world expert in anything, he enjoys having meaningful discussions on the topic of Christology and helping bridge together Christians across what seems like an unbridgeable gulf. You can see more of his conversation on this topic on his youtube channel "transfigured" which through honest dialogue seeks to see Christ for who he truly is. Chris Date is a well-known evangelical Christian author, editor, blogger, podcaster, debater, and speaker. Representing a global movement known as Rethinking Hell, he specializes in the areas of Hell and Conditional Immortality. As an expert on these topics, Chris has been interviewed in such secular media outlets as the New York Times, National Geographic, and NPR. He has debated no less than the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Albert Mohler, and been interviewed for the popular One Minute Apologist video series. He helped to frame the Statement on Evangelical Conditionalism, and he is passionate about making the case for conditionalism while fostering unity among evangelical Christians on this controversial yet very important topic. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of Theology in the Raw. This is a very long episode. I did something different that I don't think I've done before. I wanted to host a quasi-debate slash dialogue, more of a dialogue than a debate, but it kind of has some debate-y like elements to it. I am hosting in this podcast, a conversation between my friend, Chris Date and another friend of a friend, Sam Adams and his name. Yes, it makes me kind of thirsty, but anyway, this dialogue is about Unitarianism, well, sorry, biblical Unitarianism, even though Chris doesn't love

that phrase, and Trinitarianism. Is God one and one person, or is God one and three persons within that one essence, or however, you know, your, your favorite Trinitarian statement. I forgot actually how I got turned on to this conversation. It was like some conversations I was having with some friends. And I know Chris Date, and I know Chris Date has done some work in defending the Trinity and is always incredibly sharp and has great arguments. And Sam Adams is a friend of a friend. He's an, as you'll see, he's an incredibly smart dude, very humble, very knowledgeable of scripture. And I just thought this would be a good conversation to have. So please welcome to the show back again, Chris Sam Adams. Okay.

I am here with Chris date and Sam Adams, who I think has the absolute best name. I honestly, date and Sam Adams, who I think has the absolute best name. Honestly, I'm a little disappointed that it's not like the Sam Adams, but he's been dead for a few hundred years. But thank you, Sam, for being on the show. Thank you, Chris, for being on Theology in the Raw to have this important conversation. I mean, we're talking about some really fundamental aspects of, let's just say, historic Christianity. So, Chris, why don't you just start by giving us a few words about who you are, and we'll toss it over to Sam, and then we'll jump into the conversation. Sure. It's difficult for me to do just about anything in two or three minutes, but I'll

do my best. I am a husband and father of four boys ranging in age from six to 18. My wife and I have been married for almost 20 years. We live in the Pacific Northwest. And when we married, we were both atheists, but shortly after the birth of our first child, or maybe it was shortly before. Anyway, I became a believer. And then a few years later, by God's grace, he did as well. I've been a software engineer my entire adult life.

That's my career. But it's not what I'm most passionate about. I'm good at it. It makes a crap ton of money. But it's not what I'm passionate about. I would like to teach one day at the seminary level. I'd like to teach Bible and theology. And to that end, I began an undergraduate in religion at Liberty University in 2014, from which I

graduated at the beginning of 2017. And then later that year, I began a master's of arts and theology at Fuller Seminary, which is what I'm wrapping up now, after which I hope to do an Old Testament PhD at somewhere like Cambridge or Oxford, Durham, one of those top tier UK schools. Durham, one of those top tier UK schools. I am most known for my work with Rethinking Hell. I am a sort of, I'm sort of the face of the conditionalist movement today, the movement of conditional immortality. And I've published a couple of books and some journal articles in that regard. But recently, I've also been starting to dip my foot in the pool of Trinitarian theology, starting to dip my foot in the pool of Trinitarian theology, Christology. And so a number of months ago, I debated a Unitarian named Dale Tuggy in person, and we are right now reviewing a second round of proofs from a publisher

who's going to be publishing an expanded version of our debate. So hopefully that should be coming out soon. And I'm just increasingly becoming interested in this particular area of theology as well. And then there's one other area of theology that I'm most known for, which is Reformed theology, Calvinism, predestination, meticulous providence, things like that. So, yeah, I guess that's me in a nutshell. There's probably a lot more I could say, but I'll stop there. You would be on the Re reform side of things, right? You would consider yourself reform?

Very much so, yes. I didn't pick you for wanting to do a PhD in Old Testament. I don't think we've talked about this. No, well, so there are a few reasons for that. Number one, the Old Testament is just way cooler than the new. I remember I was taking a class in Aramaic at Fuller, and we were going through, I think it was the book of Ezra. And there's this part where I was translating, and I wasn't familiar with the book of Ezra prior to this. And all of a sudden, I

started translating this king's command that if his decree was disobeyed, he says, if his decree was disobeyed, he says, let a beam be taken out of his house and let him be impaled on it. And I was thinking, that's cool. That's fun to translate. You don't get anything like that in the New Testament. And then also, I think way too many Christians, they operate under this misapprehension that you can just land, you can drop the New Testament in someone's lap and they're going to be able to understand it. And there's certainly a degree to which that's true. But the Old Testament really is the fountain, you know, the wellspring from which the New Testament bursts forth. And I don't think that it can really be understood apart from a good understanding of the Old. And so for those two reasons and others, the Old Testament is what I decided I wanted to

do my specialty in. I want to ask you about your opinion on Andy Stanley's book. I know he's gotten some flack for dismissing or downgrading. What does he say? Unhitching the new test or the gospel Christianity from the Old Testament. Yeah. Don't ask me because I won't have very many kind things to say. I haven't read it and I don't like the comment on books I haven't read, but if, if the if the critiques are anywhere near the mark, I would, I would have a few words, words to say about that. I don't know if you know,

um, Chris, but, uh, I, I did my PhD in new Testament, but I've actually taught, uh, old Testament like that. That's really my primary love. So, um, yeah. Well, you and I find that you and I find more and more things that we have in common every day, don't we? Right, right. Oh, shoot. Are you there? I'm still here. Yeah, he's still here. Okay. Oh, there you are. Okay. So I clicked on something and now I can see you guys, but you're really small and up in the top corner of my computer. So anyway, all right. So I'm going to, the show must go on and I don't want to delete this episode right now. So I'm not going to click on too many things. Sam, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself? Just some, yeah, general facts about who you are.

I know we got connected because we have a mutual friend, Luke Thompson, who connected us really for this podcast, but thank you so much for being on for being on. Tell us just a bit about your story. Sure. Yeah. Thank you for having me, Preston, and shout out to Luke for helping set this up. So I grew up in the Chicago area. I grew up in a biblical Unitarian church. But at the same time, my church was pretty small growing up. So I also did sort of like youth group activities and summer camp and stuff like that and mainstream evangelical Trinitarian churches as well. So I to college. I studied statistics at Cornell. And then afterwards, I worked as a data scientist for a while and then got my degree from Harvard University in statistics also. And I work in data science and machine learning in sort of the healthcare-related

industries. But so I don't have any, we were just talking about this, I don't have any formal theological training myself, but I've been, I guess you would say, a highly engaged layperson, and a lot of this has to do with, like, when I was in college, I went to, you know, Trinitarian churches and was involved with Trinitarian Christian fellowships on campus. And I was forced to step down from one Christian fellowship because of my beliefs one time in college. And that was sort of a hard, difficult time that caused me to really sort of think about this subject kind of more intensely and more for my own than I ever had before. And then later on, actually just about a year ago, I was excommunicated from a local evangelical Trinitarian church for volunteering for the worship band and having that lead to a cascade of events that caused me to need to talk to the pastor about my beliefs. So this is one of those subjects that honestly I'm interested in almost by force and not by choice.

It's one of those things that I can't shake. And I don't know, I'm sort of a thoughtful, curious person that likes to take these questions seriously. So I've spent a lot of time studying this topic and trying to understand it. And I would honestly even say there was a period of time where I was trying to convince myself to become a Trinitarian, because that would have solved a lot of my social problems. But I failed to do so, I guess I might say. So that's sort of my background and how I got to here, I guess. Can I ask you just briefly, so you were raised in a Unitarian church. You have been in Trinitarian churches.

Why did you even explore like a Trinitarian church? Do you resonate with the flavor of evangelicalism more than a Unitarian church? So actually, I would say that my biblical Unitarian church growing up was evangelical. So this is where I know that that idea might not be reciprocated. But in my opinion, there's actually very little difference between most biblical Unitarian churches and kind of a standard evangelical Bible-oriented church that you'd find anywhere else. They have some differences in their theology, of course, but in terms of practice and style and flavor and stuff like that, it's really very similar.

Okay, interesting. Okay. Well, for my audience, what I told Chris and Sam ahead of time is that I would give each one like 10 minutes to lay out kind of their position, and then five minutes to respond to each other and then we're just going to engage in a in a dial in a dialogue and just see how that goes um so chris why don't you uh start us off with your 10 minutes and i do i do have a clock here i'm not going to be like a clock nazi okay i'm not gonna um you know the second it goes over 10 minutes like throw the phone at you wouldn't just break my computer anyway but um but but i do want to stay in within the ballpark. So, Chris, why don't you kick us off with your view of Trinitarianism? Sounds good. The doctrine of the Trinity holds that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. But the Father, Son, and Spirit are eternally personal and distinct from one another. To use the historical jargon, the oneness of God describes God's being, substance, or essence,

while the threeness of God describes the divine persons, hypostases, or subsistences. Put another way, God is one what and three whose. For nearly two millennia, Christians have debated just how this oneness and threeness of God is to be fleshed out, but I argue that person, in Trinitarian language, refers to the personal self, the possessor of being, the I who can speak of my body, my soul, my mind, or even my very being. Person in this sense is not numerically identical to being, but neither is it a concrete thing separable from being. Instead, person subsists in being. from being. Instead, person subsists in being. And to understand what it means for something to subsist in this way, consider the relationship between a husband and wife. The marital relation isn't a concrete thing. It has no being in and of itself. Rather, it subsists in the two beings

so related. I contend that person or the personal self likewise subsists in being. contend that person or the personal self likewise subsists in being. Now, creatures are universally unipersonal, that is, one and only one person subsists in each created personal being, but this shouldn't dictate how we ought to think of God any more than the universal finitude and contingency of creatures means we should think of God as finite and contingent. No, he is infinite and necessary, or he has aseity, and he may therefore also be multi-personal, even if all creatures are unipersonal. So my position is that three distinct persons or personal selves subsist eternally in the one being of God. Now, I believe this for historical, biblical, and theological reasons, but since I don't have much time, I'll

focus today on my biblical reasons, the most important of which is that the Bible teaches Jesus Christ is Yahweh incarnate, and yet he is eternally distinct from his father. Dozens of texts teach this reality, but I prefer depth to breadth, and so I want to focus on just three. I'll begin with the so-called Carmen Christi, the Christ hymn in Philippians 2, 5-7, in which Paul writes, Christ Jesus was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. If I understand Sam correctly, he believes this passage refers solely to Jesus's earthly ministry. Though he could have exercised the divine authority granted him by his father,

he instead humbly served his people rather than demand that his people serve him. This is a better Unitarian reading than that of some other Unitarians who think Paul is contrasting Jesus with Adam because Adam allegedly tried to attain equality with God, whereas Jesus did not. But this other Unitarian reading was thoroughly debunked over a hundred years ago, and one reason that it utterly fails to do justice to the text is because when Paul says Jesus didn't consider equality with God, something the ESV translates a thing to be grasped, this word actually means something to be taken advantage of or exploited, meaning that the son already possessed equality with God. And so Sam rightly thinks the son possessed this at the time he

humbled himself. But there are, I think, several fatal flaws in Sam's reading. First, when Jews roughly contemporary to Paul, like Philo and Josephus, refer to the form of God, they use it to designate what is distinctly divine, not merely authority or office, as I think Sam contends. Sam bases his reading in part on the notion that servant is a role or office, not something that has a distinctive essential ontology, as deity does. But taking the form of a servant is parallel to being born in the likeness of men, and humans do, in fact, have the essential nature of a servant to God. That is what they are created to be. The God whose nature is to rule became man whose nature is to serve. He who is Lord came as slave. Second, when

likewise contemporary Jews refer to equality with God, they mean ontological equality, equality of very being. In John 5.18, for example, John says the Jews think Jesus is making himself equal with God, for which reason they seek to kill him. Philo says there's nothing equal to God. And as a thoroughgoingly Jewish Christian, Paul wouldn't have used such language of a creature. A third reason I don't think Sam's reading holds up under scrutiny is because it seems to require that likeness of men and human form refer specifically to ordinary humans in contrast to, say, a royal birth in the lap of luxury. But there's no adjective in the text and no other evidence that Paul is thinking only of certain kinds of humans. He simply has in mind Christ's birth as human, full stop.

Thus, Paul also says in Galatians 4.4 that God sent forth his son born of woman. And he says in Romans 8.3 that God sent his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh. Moreover, and fourthly, being born in the likeness of men is again parallel to taking the form of a servant. And these are participles of means, identifying the means by which Christ emptied himself. He did not count his equality with God something to exploit, but rather he

emptied himself by becoming a human being. This is the remarkable humiliation Paul has in mind. For these and other reasons, the early church read the passage in much the way I do, including Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, and Novation. Meanwhile, I haven't seen any early Christians reading the passage the way Sam does, but I'm open to being shown to be wrong. Excuse me. Next, I want to look at Hebrews 1, 2-3, in which the author says that God has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. Significantly, the author here credits the sun with participation in creation, despite surely being familiar with Old Testament texts like Isaiah 44, 24, which say Yahweh alone created the heavens and the earth.

The author is here using language recognizably referring to the Genesis creation in saying the sun participated. In chapters 12, verses 26 and 27, the author uses the verb poieo, here translated created, to call the heavens and earth things that have been made. This language is used the same way elsewhere in the New Testament and in the intertestamental literature. Furthermore, in chapter 11, verse 3, the author uses the same word here translated world to say the universe or world was created by the word of God so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. Now that word world literally means the ages, but even if the author means to say the son was involved in the creation of the ages and not the world, he does not have only present and future ages in mind.

He says in chapter 9 verse 26 that Jesus appeared at the end of the ages, implying a succession of past ages are included as well. If the author thinks God created the ages through the Son, they nevertheless include all the ages, past, present, and future, making the Son Yahweh, the Creator and God of Israel. Finally, I want to look at Matthew 23, 37-38, in which Jesus laments, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who were sent to it, how often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing. Now, this may not seem relevant to our debate today, but when protective bird imagery is used in the ancient Near East, it always concerns a deity.

This is easily seen in ancient Near East iconography in which gods are represented by the ubiquitous winged sun disc, often hovering protectively over royalty owing to the sun's lofty position in the heavens. Protective bird imagery also features in the Old Testament, in which every instance thereof refers to Yahweh's protection of Israel. This includes Deuteronomy 32, 11 to 12, Ruth 2, 12, Psalms 17, 8 to 9, 36, 7, 57, 1, 61, 4, 63, 7, and 91, 4. Nowhere is such imagery used to portray a creature. It is striking then that Jesus self-appropriates imagery his Jewish hearers would have associated exclusively with Yahweh. The Lord and his biographers, being familiar with ancient Near East iconography and steeped in the Hebrew scriptures,

would have known of the Avian metaphor's exclusive association with the divine, and they would not have haphazardly used it of an ordinary human being, or even some sort of exalted creature. In fact, Jesus also says he is leaving the temple desolate in verse 38, and forsaken in the parallel in Luke 13, 35, the same language Yahweh uses in the Septuagint translations of Jeremiah 12, 7, and 22, 5 to describe the state in which he judicially leaves the temple forsaken and desolate. Moreover, in context, Matthew places the lament immediately after the Lord promises to hold the

scribes and Pharisees guilty for the murder of Israel's past prophets, which indicates that by claiming the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem has stymied his own frequent desire to gather the children of Israel, Jesus is referring to Yahweh's repeated attempts through history to reach the people through the prophets, which he says here were his own attempts. So let me sum up my case to wrap things up. First, in Philippians 2, 5-7, Paul describes Jesus using language contemporary Jews reserved for God alone, and he says that Jesus emptied himself by becoming human, a clear affirmation of the doctrine of incarnation. Second, in Hebrews 1, 2-3, the author says the Son participated in the Genesis creation, or the creation of all time,

thereby identifying Jesus as incarnate Yahweh, the creator and God of Israel. Third, in Matthew 23, 37 to 38, and it's parallel in Luke 13, 34 to 35, Jesus self-appropriates protective bird imagery, which his hearers would have recognized as an unmistakable self-identification with the divine. Since at least two of these texts and a host of others make clear that the Son is distinct from his Father, the only logical conclusion is that God is multi-personal and that Jesus is incarnate Yahweh. It's only a small step further to accept that the Holy Spirit is likewise one of the divine persons, a step I'll substantiate during

our open discussion if needed. Thank you. Chris, you're five, four, three. I'm known for being good with my time. I've noticed that in your other debates that you are very, very efficient in like clockwork on your statements and your time allocation. I tried. Your first rodeo, I guess. And you didn't even mention the gospel of John or Revelation. Is that intentional? I mean, I'm sure we'll get into that. Well, just suffice it to say that I'm familiar with how

Unitarians read a lot of texts that Trinitarians typically cite. Trinitarians typically cite dozens of texts and they just throw them out there and read them rather than exegete them. of texts and they just throw them out there and read them rather than exegete them uh and so what i yeah so what i prefer to do is to pick these are what i think are the three most powerful texts uh which when exegeted closely simply don't make room for a unitarian reading in my opinion and that's why i focus on them rather than take sort of a shotgun scattering approach i don't think that's very helpful should i be embarrassed that i've never connected the um the imagery yeah i mean no i might argue no as you were as you were citing those i was like oh yeah i get that but i've never considered that before this should i be should i turn in my phd

right now no no no no you actually don't hear a lot of trinitarian scholars arguing this you do see simon gather cole doing it and i think he's right to do it for the reasons that i explained but no you're not at all in a minority of scholars in failing to make that connection man what did i miss that's like yeah although a lot of scholars do think that it's a reference to himself as divine wisdom um and if you didn't know that then maybe you should be ashamed of well no yeah no i'm kidding familiar with the wisdom uh tradition. Well, thank you so much for that, Chris. And yeah, we're gonna have time for counter response and dialogue. So Sam, why

don't you take 10 minutes-ish and unpack your view? Sure. First off, I'd really like to thank Preston for hosting this dialogue. I know that many other people would have shied away from this topic, but I really admire your courage to foster open dialogue and follow the Bible where it leads. I'd also really like to thank Chris Date for engaging in this discussion with me. I admire Chris's work on the topic of hell and annihilationism. I recognize that he's a much higher status person in the world of Christian apologetics and scholarship than I am. So I appreciate him for condescending to engage with me. than I am, so I appreciate him for condescending to engage with me. One of the reasons that I want to talk with both of you is precisely because you've gone through the process of rethinking

hell. I think both of you realize that the traditional majority doctrine of eternal conscious torment was actually a later addition to the Christian tradition that was heavily influenced by Greek culture and Neoplatonism and the philosophy of the church fathers, and that once you peeled back that influence, you could see back to an earlier, more Jewish, and more contextually appropriate way of understanding things. So my point today will be to encourage you to follow that same analogy in the lessons you learned from Rethinking Hell, to also re-examine what the Bible has to say about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, their identities and their relationships with each other. I think that what is now called biblical Unitarianism is a more accurate understanding of the biblical

teachings on these subjects, and that is more faithful to the beliefs taught and believed in by the apostles, and most importantly, Jesus himself. Since many people listening will probably have never heard of biblical Unitarianism, I'll take some time to explain what it is. First, something Chris Press and I all share is a commitment to the Bible as the divinely inspired word of God, and the Bible alone as the final authority of doctrine. I just wanted to make sure that I was clear on that. I consider myself an evangelical Christian, and most biblical Unitarians are virtually indistinguishable from mainstream American evangelicals in most other ways. The difference is that biblical Unitarians

believe that God is simply one person. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a unipersonal God. He is named as Yahweh in the Old Testament, and he alone is God and there is no other. Jesus is a man born of the Virgin Mary, the prophesied and long awaited for Messiah of Israel, a man empowered by God to Mary, the prophesied and long-awaited for Messiah of Israel, a man empowered by God to do many signs, wonders, and miracles, the Son of God, but not God himself. Before he was born, Jesus only exists in the mind and foreknowledge of God. Jesus was always going to be the most important man in God's plan for creation. In a grand and mysterious sense, all of creation in the whole arc of history is Christocentric.

But in the most real sense, Jesus only began to exist when he was conceived of by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. Speaking of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not a person in the same sense that God and Jesus or you and I are. The Holy Spirit is the power and spirit of God, or perhaps something more like God's active energy and presence in creation, but it's not its own separate member of the Godhead. The Holy Spirit gave inspiration to the prophets in the Old Testament and has now been poured out on all flesh through the works of Jesus. To help show this theology in practice, I'll take some time to read parts of Acts chapter 2 and walk through how I would understand it. I think Acts 2 is one of the most important chapters in the Bible because it represents like the first gospel presentation that Peter himself is giving on the day of Pentecost.

So jumping right into verse 22. Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know. This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. You crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. know. This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Okay, so my interpretation would be you'll notice that God and Jesus are just clearly distinguished. I think everyone, Trinitarians included, intuitively understands that the God that's being referenced is the single

person of God, the Father. Peter just feels no need to clarify, and his Jewish audience would have already understood God to be one person, the Father, although they might not have called him the Father in that same way as referring to Jesus. But he doesn't take any time to clarify to his audience who he's talking about. It's the same person they already believe in. Jesus doesn't do miracles from his intrinsic power, but God does them through him. Jesus has always been part of the plan and foreknowledge, but he wasn't existing earlier. A question that I would have for Chris is exactly in what sense Jesus died. If Jesus was fully divine, how could his divinity allow him to die? If God were killed, who would raise him up? But God isn't killed. Rather, God is the one who raises Jesus up. Okay, continuing in verse 32.

This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses, being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. For God did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. Okay, an extremely important theme throughout the New Testament is that Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God. Yahweh can't receive a promotion.

This only makes sense if Jesus is not God, but is rather someone exalted by God. Also notice that Jesus had to receive the promise of the Holy Spirit from God. Peter quotes Psalm 110, which is critically important. Chris states that Jesus is Yahweh, but here in Psalm 110, we see a prophetic vision of the Messiah sitting at Yahweh's right hand. I think that one source of confusion on the topic of the Trinity is the word Lord. In English and in Greek, the word Lord can refer to both God or a human being. And so I think it sort of blurs the distinction a little bit in people's minds and they interchange them in ways that can cause some confusion.

But in Hebrew, this verse is actually quite clear and quite different. It reads, Yahweh said to my Adoni. Adoni is a word for human lords and is only ever used for humans. There's a related word Adonai, which can be either a human or a God, but Adonai is only ever referred to humans. Yahweh is clearly distinguished from his human Messiah. You can't both be Yahweh and sit at Yahweh's right hand in heaven. The psalm is also extremely important because it foreshadows Jesus' heavenly rule. Jesus is not God himself returning back to the heavens after a short period as a man, instead he is a newly exalted to reign alongside his father and after being perfected through suffering and finishing the race his

father set before him. This relates to 1 Corinthians 15 verses 23 through 28. Then the end will come when he, that is Jesus, hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority, and power. For he must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, for he has put everything under his feet. Now when it says that everything has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who puts everything under him so that God may be all in all. Notice how Paul goes out of his way to explain that God himself, which is an interesting phrase, is not subjected to Jesus because for him that would be absurd.

But instead, Jesus is subject to God in eternity after serving as God's active agent to subdue all powers and authorities unto God. How can God himself to be subject to anyone for eternity? All right, returning back to Acts 2. After Peter ends his sermon by mentioning that God has made the crucified and risen Jesus both Lord and Christ. We learn that thousands of people became Christians that day. Another important topic for our discussion today is not just the relationship between God and Jesus, but also the question of what must be believed in in order to be saved. From my intro, you heard that I'm perfectly happy to commune with Trinitarians and to count them as my brothers and sisters in Christ. I may think that they are mistaken, but not fatally so. I think they have the basics right. The basics that Peter preached in his sermon, that Jesus was a man who lived an honorable life, was wrongly crucified, died and was buried, then God raised him from the

dead and has exalted him to his right hand from where he will return to judge the living and the dead. Trinitarians believe all these things, as do biblical Unitarians, as did the people who heard Peter's sermon that day. However, many Trinitarians think that you have to believe additional things in order to be saved. Peter's teaching failed to communicate the core doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. In fact, he seems to even contradict them. I ask you, if these things are required for Christian faith, why didn't Peter mention them? How then could thousands of people

have been saved that day? My contention is that Peter didn't teach them or believe in the Trinity, but instead had a specifically a different theology about those things. Many Trinitarians believe that the Trinity is an essential doctrine without which the entire edifice of theology would fall apart. It's like, imagine as the base layer of a cake, and if you were to take that layer away, the whole cake would collapse. However, Christianity was not Trinitarian for centuries, and biblical Unitarians are living proof that that isn't true. I think of the Trinity as something like a fancy and clunky decoration that was added to the cake after it was already baked, and that really distracts more than it helps, and that the cake is best enjoyed without it. This is why I think these discussions are so

important but also difficult. There's a certain asymmetry in these discussions where biblical Unitarians treat Trinitarians as fellow Christians and try to engage in good dialogue, but the Trinitarians often don't return the favor and we get dismissed as heretics. This is also why I'm grateful to Preston and Chris today, because I hope we can get beyond this divide. I know both of you have experienced the cold-hearted stonewalling for believing in annihilationism. I also heard that you asked for, you know, nothing more than a seat at the table to be able to discuss your views, and that you've spent so much time studying and analyzing them, and that it can hurt to be treated studying and analyzing them and that it can hurt to be treated with condescension and scorn. So I'm asking for the same from both of you and

all the listeners out there today. Assume that I might have something to say that you haven't yet fully considered. Accept me as someone seeking nothing more or less than good faith dialogue about the word of God. Thanks. Thank you, Sam. Really appreciate that. And that was my timing. I was wearing the same thing. 24 seconds over your, your five. This is a ballpark. This is my, this is my first rodeo. So I just want to say, I mean, to be accepted without ridicule or scorn, you know, I, I might have said this during my intro. I haven't recorded it yet for my audience. I record my intros after the podcast. So, but, you know, I'm a big fan of exchanging ideas, humanizing each other and letting the evidence, you know,

compete against each other. So, no, I really appreciate your posture and tone and your commitment to following the text where it leads. Even if we end up walking away disagreeing, which I'm going to assume, you know, maybe one of us will change our view in this moment. This would be really amazing, but probably not. But what I want to do is be able to have our audience hear a good, thoughtful, humble presentation of each view. You keep using the phrase biblical Unitarianism. Is that to distinguish it from another kind of Unitarianism? Yes.

We don't use the word biblical Unitarianism as an insult to Trinitarians, we use it as a way to distinguish ourselves from Unitarian Universalists, who have often strayed away from the Bible and really any kind of form of Christianity whatsoever. And Unitarian Universalism is more common and more well heard of than Biblical Unitarianism. So the word biblical is against that side, not against you guys. And that's a specific denomination, right? It's not actually a specific denomination. There are a collection of denominations, kind of, that have, many of them have independently come to the same conclusion. And there's also sort of a network of kind of small or house or independent churches who have

sometimes had to break away from larger denominations over the subject. And back in like the early, you know, the late 1700s and early 1800s, back when Unitarianism was first becoming a big thing in the United States, there were conservative and kind of liberal elements to the movement. And so, you know, Unitarianism has had a long history in the United States, but for the most part, the liberals have won in terms of numbers. So within the Unitarian movement, you would see yourself as kind of a minority person by the fact that you are a biblical... Yes, we're a minority of a minority. Okay, that's always fun.

Just to clarify something, although biblical Unitarians, so-called, and we can talk about that later, but although they're not a denomination, I do think that the Unitarian Universalists are, right? I mean, they've got... They are, yes, they are an actual denomination. That's right. Okay. All right, Chris, do you want to give a five-minute response to Sam's 10 minutes? Sure, I'll do my best. Now, Sam spent a lot of time in Acts chapter 2, and he suggested that Peter somehow failed to communicate what Trinitarians would say are essential elements of the gospel to these Jews at Pentecost they were trying to reach.

I don't actually think that that's true. In verses 16 to 18 in Acts chapter 2, Peter quotes Joel's prophecy that God would pour out his spirit, and he says it's being fulfilled before the Jewish people's very eyes. This Jesus, God raised up and being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit. He, that is Jesus, has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. And again, the prophecy of Joel that he quoted has Yahweh pouring out his spirit upon all flesh. Now, we can debate whether or not that substantiates my view, but my point is at least one very plausible prima facie reading of Peter's words there is that he did in fact think that Jesus was incarnate Yahweh.

You know, I think that I heard Sam say in his opening there, that the Jews contemporary to Peter would have understood God to be one person. But Sam has recently interviewed Eastern Orthodox scholar Bo Branson, who said in his interview with Sam, or his discussion with Sam, that Jews in that time would have been fine with two divine persons, one of whom they would have identified as the Memra, which I think is Aramaic for word, kind of like we might, like we see in the Old Testament. So I don't actually think that there's any reason for assuming that Jews would have thought Yahweh is unipersonal, and a scholar that Sam has

interviewed says as much. Now, Sam asked me in his opening, in what sense did Jesus die if he was fully divine? And I answer this in my debate book with Dale Tuggy, a manuscript of which I sent to Sam to review beforehand. And so if he's read it, and if not, I'll understand. We haven't had a whole lot of time to prepare. He knows exactly how I'll answer that. And I'll offer two possible answers, which aren't mutually exclusive and aren't exhaustive. There are other conceivable answers as well. And they all play on an important detail of the law of non-contradiction and logic. It's sometimes stated as if the law says something can't both be and not be, period.

But that's not what it says. It says something cannot both be and not be in the same sense and at the same time. And the two possible answers I offer to this trade on those two qualifications. So take, for example, the issue of same sense. For a human being to die means that his or her body ceases to become animate. It becomes inert, inanimate, inactive as a result of being separated from its life-giving soul, or if you're a dualist, however you want to play that out. But of course, for a divine being to die would be, would mean something entirely different, because a divine being, the divine being, has no body to die and soul invigorating or animating that body. So yeah,

Jesus, as fully divine, would not, could not die as a divine being. But that doesn't mean that he couldn't die as a human being, to suffer death in the sense of what it means for a human to die, which is different from what it would mean for God to die. Another possible explanation is a very historical view of incarnational Christology, known as the two minds view, which is the idea that, or sorry, sorry, let me, that was something I offered to a different direction in the book. Rather, the doctrine of divine timelessness. So classic theology maintains that the divine being is outside of time. And by definition, that means that something that happens inside of time can't affect the being, the divine being outside of time. So we can trade then on the qualification about being at the same time, that qualification of the logical law of non-contradiction, and say that outside of time, the divine being didn't die, but inside time, the incarnate God did, in fact, die. Either of those two answers sufficiently answers the objection, but of course, we can talk about that further as our discussion continues. How can Yahweh incarnate receive a promotion or exaltation or receive the Holy Spirit?

Very simple. Yahweh incarnate is not just God. He's also human. The human Jesus began to exist at the incarnation. And so it's not that the human Jesus returned to a position of exaltation. No, because the human Jesus began at the incarnation. But that human is who was exalted in much the same way that an author might be exalted if he incarnated himself in his novel. Really quickly, in these last seconds I have, there's a famous issue of a

comic book in which, what's his name, The creator of the Marvel universe. He is in the comic book itself. So he incarnates himself in the comic book. Well, whatever happens to his incarnation in the comic book doesn't affect his being outside of the comic book. And I would say the same is true here. God the Son became incarnate, and that human incarnate, God incarnate, is who was exalted. There's much more we could say,

but I'll leave it at there. Cause I'm already 30 seconds over my time. I actually forgot to hit start. So I was off on my, I keep track of my own time. So I'm not worried about you. Your Facebook post from a couple of days ago, Chris starts to make sense. I was wondering if you might be hinting at something like that yeah I love that you guys have been like scouting each other this is so cool Sam would you like to give a five minute response to Chris sure to be honest my the one I had prepared is less relevant than expected so I might just wing this I was mainly going to with my rebuttal

focus a little bit on historical stuff. Maybe I'll just summarize that briefly and then kind of answer some of the more things that Chris said. I would say that Trinitarianism of the sort that Chris believes, where God or Yahweh or the one true God is a tri-personal being, doesn't really show up in the historical record until about 380 AD, with like Gregory of Nazianzus probably being the first example. So it seemed weird to me if the early Christians were that, when the first historical person who teaches something like that is about the same distance that we have from when the

pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock from the time when Jesus died. And so you can go back in time and you can kind of see earlier versions of Christology and earlier versions of the Trinity, like Bo Branson, that philosophy professor who's Eastern Orthodox that I interviewed, he promotes what's called monarchical Trinitarianism, where Yahweh or the one true God is only God the Father, but he shares his essence with the Son and the Spirit, but they aren't Yahweh. They're just co-divine eternal persons.

And that's really actually the form of the Trinity that you see in the Nicene Creed, right? That's why it starts, we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, right? Because they, in some real sense, thought that the truest God was still the Father and not the Son or the Spirit. And you can keep kind of peeling back the layers of going further back in time. The first time that the Trinity was used by a Christian to describe the Father, the Spirit, and the Son as the members of the Trinity was Tertullian writing around the year 200. Tertullian is kind of a weird guy. He believed that God was a material substance within the universe, almost like an element on the periodic table, right? So that's sort of a weird thing for us to think about in that God globbed off the sun and the spirit out of his own

stuff, like literal material stuff. So that's actually the first example of Christian Trinitarianism is something that's almost hard for us to imagine. But Tertullian also testified in that same work that Trinitarianism was a minority view at the time, and that most of the people he knew didn't like the Trinity, because it seemed like it was believing in more than one God. So I'll kind of, I'll skip some of my other notes on that topic, but I'll say the further you go back in time, the less Trinitarian Christianity appears to be. And the more there are alternatives to Trinitarianism, or if you go back far enough before the year 200, no one would have described themselves as a Trinitarian. So how can for 200 years, not even the doctrine that is defined as true Christianity not even really seem to exist?

Now, if you're to ask the question of people saying that Jesus is God, you can go back much earlier than that on that particular point. But it's also important to remember then the classical era, God could have meant a lot of different things, and it could have meant a second God, or a subordinate God, or just sort of a title, or a Gnostic sense. There was lots of different varieties of what it meant for Jesus to be God. Anyway, I'll stop there, and just to, I'll stop on that train of thought just to say that earliest Christianity doesn't appear to be Trinitarian. And that's actually really not that controversial of a point among historians of religion. As far as Philippians 2 goes, I'll appreciate that Chris complimented my interpretation. But suffice it to say that I think that Philippians 2 is about Jesus's earthly life.

And Chris said that no church fathers read Philippians 2 my way. And I don't think that's entirely true. I'll make a case. It's not lockdown. So I'll say that. But Clement of Rome was one of the bishops of Rome. And he wrote a letter in like the 90s AD. He's actually one of the earliest writers outside the New Testament that we have.

And Philippians 4 mentions a person named Clement, so it could very well be that Clement of Rome was actually mentioned in the letter of Philippians itself. That's not for certain, but in any case, that he was an early Christian writer. And in his letter to the Corinthian church, he says, for Christ is of those who are humble-minded and not of those who exalt themselves over his flock. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the scepter of the majesty of God, did not come in the pride of pomp or arrogance, although he might have done so, but in a lowly condition, as the Holy Spirit has declared regarding him. And then it goes on to quote Isaiah 53 for a while.

And you can see here that he's making the point that Jesus could have come in a prideful or arrogant way, exalting himself over everybody else and making everyone subject to him and kind of do his will. But instead, he was kind of a humble servant leader and came in a lowly condition. So this sort of, it certainly has echoes of Philippians 2. And we certainly know that Clement was very familiar with the writings of Paul. So I think that theme of Jesus not having been a selfish, lording person while he was on earth, but instead being a humble person while he was on earth, was a very common theme in both the New Testament and outside the New Testament.

And that's the basic gist of why I think Paul is trying to communicate there. I'll probably stop because I think I'm running out of time, but I'll come to the protective bird imagery later, but I'll suffice to say that I don't find it very convincing. No, I appreciate that. You're only a few seconds over. You're good. I just want to say, Sam and Chris, I just appreciate both of you guys going to the text of scripture as your authority to justify and defend your position. And I know, Tris, you have some quibbles with just using the term biblical with Unitarianism. Maybe we can explore that later. Sam, I'm going to pass this over to Chris, or maybe just to both of you for discussion. I was just in a conversation

last night with my brother-in-law, who is an Old Testament scholar. We studied at the same place in Scotland together. And we actually got into a conversation about this. And we're both Trinitarian, but I raised the question. Well, I didn't raise a question. I stated that while I think Trinitarianism is an essential component of the architecture of the Christian faith, it's not

essential for every individual to be saved in other words you know and i said this in an email exchange for between you and chris that you know most first century believers even as as a staunch trinitarianism a trinitarian most first century believers without the new testament um probably didn't have a tertullian-ish articulationulation of the Trinity as a prerequisite for salvation. I don't think the thief on the cross was Trinitarian. So I think it's, it's okay to make a distinction between something that's, you know, for my audience, at least, you know, something that we see as really essential for the architecture of the Christian

faith, which took hundreds of years to work out. You know, we didn't, we don't have the first statement on which books belong in the New Testament until 367 by Athanasius, you know, so our New Testament was in flux for hundreds of years, which might relate to your point about the very early Christians, let's just say 200 years, not even having their Trinitarianism worked out yet. I would maybe at some point love to explore how that relates to the formation of the canon. Because the doctrine of the Trinity, it does seem to be dependent, not exclusively,

but largely on the New Testament. Anyway, anyway, so the conversation last night, my brother-in-law said, well, Ignatius of Antioch was Trinitarian. We have clear statements about that. And he lived from like 35 AD to 100. You were close, 50 to 110. 50 to 110. Okay, so he's really early.

He's just as early as Clement of Rome. Okay, so according to my brother-in-law, he had clear articulations of the Trinityinity do you have any key i wouldn't that's not that's not true it's not true you know in 2020 i've got google up i'm googling stuff and i have here like you know some statements on it but yeah i would love to hear maybe both your thoughts on ignatius and the trinity and then i just want to pass it on to you and i'll shut up for a while yeah chris you can go first i'll probably disagree with what you're about to say anyway. Well, I think you'll agree with some of what I say, but if you're like Dale Tuggy, you'll disagree with something else.

So let me say what I think we'll both agree on. If we are to take what's called the middle recension of Ignatius of Antioch's works to be genuine, as I do, and as most scholars do, then as opposed to what are called the long and short recensions, this is a whole topic that would be a waste of our audience's time to get into deeply. But in that middle recension, Ignatius of Antioch makes it extremely clear that he believes that Yahweh is, sorry, that Jesus is incarnate Yahweh. So for example, he writes, let's see here, he says, he says, Jesus is both made and not made, God existing in flesh, true life and death, both of Mary and of God, first

passable and then impassable. He is him who is above all time, eternal and invisible, yet who became visible for our sakes, impalpable and impassable, yet who became passable on our account. So it's very clear that if we take this middle recension of his epistles to be genuine, then yes, Ignatius, tied for the earliest Christian writing we have, other than the New Testament itself, he believed that Jesus was incarnate Yahweh, and it's very clear he doesn't believe that Jesus is the Father. So, but there is no indication, so far as I can tell, that Ignatius believed that the Holy Spirit is a person, or in any other way affirmed Trinity, and that's why I would disagree with your, with the person that you were just talking about. Now, I think that so far, and Sam can correct me

if I'm wrong, we would agree, but if he's like Dale Tug... I might make one point and let you continue. Sure. Maybe I might have to ask just for clarification on this later, but I think I'm a little bit confused sometimes about the way you use Yahweh. that I would agree that Ignatius of Antioch thought that Jesus was God in some sense, obviously. I'm not an expert on him. I've maybe read him once, and it maybe wasn't even that recently, so I won't speak beyond my expertise. But I think that you sometimes maybe underestimate the complexity of the different ways people could believe someone was God, and that when you say, believe someone was Yahweh, what I hear you saying is that Yahweh is a person, and Jesus was also somehow subsisting in that person, whereas I do think

that, like, Ignatius didn't speak Hebrew. He actually wouldn't have known the word Yahweh. He would have been speaking Greek, and he would have known the word Yahweh. He would have been speaking Greek, and he would have known the word theos. But in Greek, you can either use theos to mean a person, or you can use it to mean substance, right? Like, you are a human is sort of what you are. And your humanness is sort of the abstract quality that you have, right? And that's not the same. So sometimes I think it's like the distinction between who and what, right? And then even in those days, there were gradations of ways that you could be God.

And I would bet that I'm on a limb, so I probably shouldn't even say this, but I bet if you dug through the authentic writings of Ignatius, you could find ways in which it was pretty clear that he believed in some kind of subordinationism in terms of Jesus not being as important or as powerful or perhaps something like that as God the Father, whom he would have called the God as opposed to just God as like an adjective, right? It's the difference between a personal noun and an adjective. Sure. Well, so a few things there. First of all, just because even if you can find something in Ignatius that indicates that he believes that

the son is subordinate to the father, that wouldn't support your view over mine. As you know, Bo Branson represents an Eastern Orthodox view of the Trinity, which is very hierarchical. The even many evangelicals believe in the eternal subordination of the son to the father. So, so just because even if we were to see, or Ignatius affirming the son's subordination of the father, you wouldn't have something other than Trinity. Secondly, yes, I agree with you just using using the word theos does

not mean that he believes Jesus is God in the same sense that the Father is. But that's kind of the whole point. It's also the very reason why I point to this passage in Matthew with the protective bird imagery, because sometimes saying some such or somebody is God doesn't tell you a whole lot. But when you start saying other things, it becomes much clearer than if you had simply said such and such as God. So when Ignatius says that Jesus is both made and not made, that he's true life, that he's passable and impassable, that he's eternal and invisible, that he's above all time, impalpable and impassable, visible, that he's above all time, impalpable and impassable, yet became passable. This is language that just could not describe a creature. And that's what I'm trying to say, is I think

Ignatius was a monotheist. I would agree that he didn't think Jesus was a creature. And to be clear, by creature, I mean, he didn't come into being at some point, by creature i mean he he's not he didn't come into being at some point but just to be clear it also gets weird when you talk about coming into being before time or before creation gets made because that was like one of those whole things that the whole aryan controversy was about like is there time before the beginning of creation or or exactly you know, it gets a little bit funny that way. A lot of the subordinationist kind of benitarian sort of high pre-existence form of Jesus would still have thought that Jesus came out of the father, that the pre-existence son came out of the father. I suppose we might be getting a little bit too deep in the woods on Ignatius.

Like, I would certainly agree that there are people that are well on the way towards what later will become Trinitarianism and around the year 100. But they weren't there yet. And there are some noticeable and important distinctions. And the fact that there are distinctions between later Trinitarians and early super exalted language about Jesus being God sort of people like Ignatius or Justin or Clement of Alexandria, it points in the direction of change and development over time. And if you extrapolate that backwards, that means that it wasn't there earlier. No, I don't agree with you there, with the utmost of respect. I would agree with you, and I think this, as you pointed out in your opening, is fairly uncontroversial, that the doctrine of the Trinity as we understand it is something that developed over time. I

totally agree with you there. But what I think you can't demonstrate with the historical data is that the belief that Jesus is incarnate Yahweh developed over time. As far as I can tell, based on my meager historiographical skills, that's simply a bald claim that Unitarians make, but which they can't substantiate. Well, there were, I mean, another leg of this story is that there were a lot of people who didn't agree with the early kind of what I might call proto-Trinitarians, right? Sure. Like people like Ignatius or Justin or something like that. There were also other theologians and also other church fathers who disagreed

with them. And they seem to have been perhaps even more numerous in the earliest stages. Like I can point to early church fathers or, well, they're not called fathers because they're discarded as heretical in most cases, who agreed with me, or at least I think they did. We don't have a lot of their writings because they didn't survive very well. But it's clear when proto-Trinitarians are writing works against people that they disagree with, that some of the people that they disagreed with sound a lot like what I'm trying to say now. And there was also Gnostics, and there was also Modalists, right? There was at least four or five major strains of thought within early Christianity, one of which I would agree with,

one of which is more similar to you, although I would say that the early versions of the strain that lead to you actually have important differences from you. Well, I agree that there are some differences, but where I disagree with you is that these different groups you've cited are evidence that there was disagreement over whether Jesus was incarnate Yahweh. You mentioned, for example, modalists. Well, they're on my side of the question of who Jesus is. They just don't believe in the Trinity. Well, sure,

but they believe there was one God, one being that is God, one person that is God, and that person is Jesus and the Father and so forth. But they still believed he was incarnate Yahweh. And I think that there's, my contention as somebody who's not a professional historian, is that when you look at all these various disagreeing positions in the early church, what you find is certainly they disagree on how to make sense of Jesus' identity. But that struggle to make sense of it seems to be a struggle to reconcile two things that they all agreed on. One, monotheism, and two, that Jesus is that God. That's my contention. And of course, we'd have to dive into the weeds to figure that out. I think very, very few of them, except the early modalists, would have said that Jesus is that God. I think that distinction was far more universal than unity, I'll say. And that really the earliest people who would have said that Jesus

was God in the higher sense, again, they were speaking Greek, they wouldn't have used the word Yahweh, except for maybe some of the Aramaic Christians. But that there is far more emphasis on distinction. And one of the earliest heresies that gets condemned is patropatianism, which was an early way of criticizing modalists, because it just seems scandalous, the idea that God himself would have come down and be crucified. And that was actually very- It was scandalous that the father would do so. But they meant it as the same thing. And I don't think that I'm reading that back into it. And that's where I think we're going to disagree. Yeah.

Fair enough. And in any case, I think we've laid out our historical narratives a little bit i think how about this is right yeah no this is this is actually good i think the early church uh perspective on this is important but i don't want it to exhaust all our time how about this um sam and then chris can you give just a 30 second summary of how you understand let's just say the pre-constantine and post-constantine maybe church view on this um the kind of messy pre-constantine first few hundred years the canon's not even complete there's lots of diversity like how would you summarize that and then obviously trinitarianism becomes the kind of i don't want to put words in here you know the accepted main view and maybe explain why that happens it might might take more than 30 seconds how about a minute how about a minute each okay

constantine view on the trinity i'll do my best i think that the earliest one the earliest strains of christianity were similar to what i was describing and in fact numerous of the early jewish groups who split off from sort of mainstream Christianity because they were Hebrewizers or Judaizers who wanted to maintain the law had a very similar Christology to me. I disagreed with them about, you know, faith and grace and works and circumcision and stuff. But I think that early split in the family tree points to the fact that the earliest Christology was more Jewish and sounded like what I described earlier. I think the second thing that showed up on the scene almost simultaneously was actually Gnosticism, right? And Gnosticism thought that Jesus was God, but just not incarnate,

right? He was from some spiritual realm, and he was like a phantom walking around or something like that, but he wasn't actually a fleshly body. And you can actually see writings in the New Testament criticizing that view, which shows how early that that was. So I think the first two views on the scene were something like Jewish standard Unitarianism, exalted Christology, and Gnosticism. Then one of the next things to show up, I think, is kind of simultaneously you start seeing modalism and kind of very platonically influenced Jesus Logos-ism, right? Jesus Logos-ism would be the strain that becomes both actually Arianism and Trinitarianism, but in its earliest stages, like Justin Martyr, who was a platonic philosopher before he was a Christian, he sort of thought of God as this one high being above all of whom you

can't really say anything. And then he begets the Logos, and then the Logos becomes incarnate, right? And that was a very platonically influenced idea. And then they're sort of swirling and arguing, right? There's no central authority in the early Christian church in the days that they're persecuted. And different pockets of the empire believe different things. And sometimes there's disagreement within churches. And then sort of slowly over time, I think especially the highly educated population centers like Alexandria and later Constantinople and Antioch and stuff like that, kind of bought more into the platonic proto-Trinitarian, but also proto-Aryan version of things. And that, because that sort of won the core, you might say, sort of won the

stronghold of intellectual opinion, that that's sort of what became to dominate. And then Constantine has the Council of Nicaea, and that is like the people think, oh, that decided the Trinity for all time. No, like half the people who signed the First Nicene Creed were Arians. And even then, Arianism was the language, the theology of the barbarians for centuries thereafter. So it's really messy. But I do think that my side lost out in part because it wasn't as popular among the intelligentsia, and because it seemed more Jewish than it did seem in line with popular pagan philosophy of the time. Thank you for that, Sam. That's super interesting. Chris, give me 30 seconds. I'm going to come to you. I just want to interject with a commercial break that given all this messiness, even if what Sam said has a measure of truth, it is fascinating that one of the few things

that the early church did agree upon is that Christians should be nonviolent. You didn't see that coming, did you? I didn't. I just saw that in there because I read all this stuff and it's like, they were pretty unanimous on that. They couldn't agree on the Trinity, but they agreed that Christians shouldn't be violent.

All right, Chris, go with your summary of the early church. Sure, yeah. So when I went into my debate with Dale Tuggy, I was a little nervous going into my study of the historical details, because it's often, this is a common meme you hear nowadays, that when Trinitarians go to the historical data, they end up finding out, whoa, there's no basis for this there. What I actually found is that the historical data favors Trinitarianism rather than works against it. We've already talked about Ignatius of Antioch, who uses language that really can't be mistaken for thinking that he believed a creature or something that began to exist became incarnate in Jesus. And interestingly, Ignatius' works, they seem at greater pains to emphasize the reality of Jesus' human existence. It was Jesus' humanity that was more in question in Ignatius' day than his divinity. Ignatius hated the Gnostics. Sorry for interrupting. That's all right. So there's Ignatius, and he's between 50 and 110 AD. Justin

Martyr in 160, he attempts to persuade his Jewish readers that the pre-incarnate Christ is the Yahweh in Psalms 2410 and 99, four to five. Melito of Sardis in 170, he says that he that hung up the earth in space was himself hanged up. He that fixed the heavens was fixed with nails, God put to death. And the writer to Diognetus, this is Matthaeus, I think is what we're talking about here, but it's the one writing to Diognetus between 150 and 200. He says, God has sent from heaven and placed among men him who is the truth and the holy and incomprehensible word, the very creator and fashioner of all things. So what you see in the earliest writings that we have from Christians is that they all agree that this Yahweh who is speaking and whose actions are recorded in the Old Testament is Jesus incarnate. How they make sense of that, how they reconcile this reality with their commitment to monotheism is the story that unfolds from there,

whether Trinitarianism or Arianism or whatever. So you have the development over time of how to make sense of those two facts, but those two facts nevertheless appear to be true. And what's interesting is that even after Nicaea, even councils that resisted Nicaea still affirmed the centrality of Jesus' deity to the faith. So, for example, Dale Tuggy, in one of his books, he observes that what is called the Second Creed of Sirmium in 357, it excludes some of the language of Nicaea. But what historians recognize is that this wasn't really a creed at all. It was a position paper signed begrudgingly and under duress by a supporter of Nicaea in the presence of a tiny handful of anti-Nicene bishops. But meanwhile, the earlier first creed of Sirmium, which came about 25 years or so after Nicaea, it echoes Nicaea's confession

that the son who before all ages was begotten from the father, is God from God, light from light, by whom all things were made. And it curses, it pronounces anathema against anyone who says that there was a time when the son didn't exist. And there's much more I could say there. So you've got this really interesting historical reality here, I think, and this is demonstrable, I think. You've got the church trying to make sense of the fact that there's only one God, and yet this God is Jesus. And how that is worked out is something that takes place over time. But even after Nicaea, and even in councils that are trying to resist Nicaea to some degree, the deity of Christ and his identity as the Yahweh of the Old Testament is affirmed by such councils as essential to the faith.

So what I would say is this. I would say that the doctrine of the Trinity as it came to be known isn't what's essential to Christianity necessarily. What I would say is essential to Christianity based on this historical data is that Jesus is Yahweh incarnate and Jesus isn't the father how we make sense of those two things is another question but those that's why I focus on that in my in my case for the Trinity and we haven't even gotten to the spirit yet I don't even mind focusing people is the third leg of the Trinity, the third wheel of the Trinity. Yeah. And in a sense, I mean, if all we did is focus on the relationship between Jesus and God, the father, to use Trinitarian language, whether they are both God in the same way and distinct persons, we can almost center on that for our discussion. persons. We can almost center on that for our discussion. I don't even mind, you know, not exhausting the Spirit. Or is the Spirit essential to your position, Sam? I mean, is that...

I would say that the stuff about the Spirit in the New Testament is more confusing and weird. I think we can all agree sometimes that the passages about the Holy Spirit are sometimes a little head-scratching. I mean, I don't know, Chris. I mean, I would agree that when it comes to the Trinity, there's much more New Testament footing for the Son and the Father in the sort of Trinitarian way. The Spirit, I mean, we can go to Acts 5, and there's personality characteristics describing the Spirit, and there's other passages, but it's not as pervasive as, say, Jesus and the Father being different yet one. Would you agree with that, Chris? I would say a qualified yes. You know, I think the thing that is interesting about the language used to describe the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is that, yes, it is, or he is, as I would say, personalized. He's presented using personal language, but it's difficult, I think,

to press that into service strongly in favor of the Trinity. I mean, there's no reason that God, I mean, God's word in some texts is personified in a way that I don't think even Trinitarians would want to say means his word in those passages is in fact a person um so so i would say the the personal language of the holy spirit in the new testament is under the is under this it doesn't it's under under determining i'll go with that i'll agree with that but but what tips the scale for me into affirming the personhood of the holy spirit is that once you accept as i do and of course sam doesn't but once you accept, as I do, and of course Sam doesn't, but once you accept that the Son is a divine person, equal and equally eternal and so forth to the Father, well, then you've got to contend with the fact that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all, you know, it's the same name that they all three share impossible, that the authors of the New Testament would believe there are these two divine persons, father and son, and then there's this active work or activity in the world on the part of the Holy Spirit is also one of those three divine persons, and that would be what tips the personal language, the underdetermining personal language about the Holy Spirit over the fence into my camp. That would be my position.

Okay, my brief response on pneumatology, to show off fancy words, would be that sometimes the Holy Spirit is talked about like it's a person or in a personified sort of way, and sometimes it's not. And I think it's okay to personify something, but it's not okay to deperson a person, right? And so I would agree that the Holy Spirit has personified language in the same way that like, like you mentioned, probably you were thinking of Proverbs 8 in terms of, you know, God's wisdom being personified, but it's not, it's never talked about as something that's worshiped. It's never talked about as something that's kind of like, I don't know, out there doing its own thing, really. I think it's something a little bit hazier and more

mysterious and something like the way that God works in the world. And, you know, it's God's spirit. I really think that's just the simplest, you know, way to describe what it is. Just to be clear, though, the fact that the Holy Spirit doesn't receive the kind of attention you just described doesn't lend itself to your view over ours, because our view, rightly or wrongly, is that the Holy Spirit's role is to point people to the Son and to the Father. And so we would expect... I would agree with that. Yeah, well, the difference being I believe he's a person.

So anyway, my point is, I understand the challenge from the fact that he is sometimes spoken of without personal terms. And that's a legitimate challenge. But I don't think the fact that he's not worshipped, etc. means anything really. So I think that, yeah, the topic of et cetera, means, it means anything really. So. I think that, yeah, the topic of the Holy spirit is a little underdetermined and it's hard for either of us to nail each other down on that one. I'll go along with that.

What do you guys want to, I would love to go back to maybe some of the passages we talked about Philippians two or the Jesus and the mother hen kind of reference or one um and i'll just whoever wants to jump in um any major concerns pushbacks to what maybe one of you have said about those passages could can i ask chris some some questions about sort of maybe almost philosophical questions about what exactly he means no uh okay so i'm kidding because honestly there's part of me that's that's still honestly a little bit legitimate about what exactly he means. No. Okay. No, I'm kidding. Back to Philippians 2 then. Because honestly, there's part of me

that's still honestly a little bit legitimately confused by what exactly you mean by your words. And I want to be clear that I understand you before I criticize you or else I could be punching a paper dragon or missing the mark. And so before I do that, I really want to know what you mean. So like, I'm still a little bit confused by the way you use the

word Yahweh, because I would only ever use the word Yahweh to mean a person, right? To me, when you say the Father is Yahweh, the Son is Yahweh, the Spirit is Yahweh, what I hear you saying is there's like three sub-persons who make up one super-person, or something like that. Whereas, I'm not sure if that's what you mean. I think you are using Yahweh as something almost like an essence or a quality. No. No, I accept that Yahweh is a personal name, but I don't believe that therefore only one person can be referred to using that name. If it's true that the being that is God who presents himself personally in the Old Testament is ascribed the name Yahweh, or ascribes to himself the name Yahweh, and especially if that name is itself a, has its root in a verb, you know, the copula in the Old Testament Hebrew, hayah, then it would make sense. It's singular and personal and, right? Yeah. that is if the being that is you know the being that is necessarily um can if if the person who um manifests the being of god in the old testament can be described using the name yahweh or referred

to using the name yahweh i don't see any reason for thinking that name can't equally apply to the other divine persons the the thing that confuses me is it sounds like you have four persons. It sounds like you have the Father, the Son, the Spirit, and Yahweh. But is that right or is that wrong? Well, it's wrong insofar as it doesn't reflect my view. As I explained in the opening, my 10-minute opening, I believe that the word person in Trinitarian language, which by the way, hopefully we can all agree, isn't how we use person now, right? This is a mistake that Dale Tuggy made in his closing argument in our book. The whole time we're using person in Trinitarian terms.

And then all of a sudden at the end of the book, he treats it as if I've been using person in the language that we use nowadays. And this is the problem with some of these debates. But when I talk about person using Trinitarian language, I defined it right there in the beginning of my opening. It's a personal self. And it's the self. When I say my being, the person, the personal self is the possessor of being. And it's something that subsists in being. It isn't a concrete thing separable from it.

And even though creatures are universally unipersonal, I don't see any reason for thinking that the divine being can't be tripersonal. It still seems like you have four persons. I'm not using Trinitarian language, because in order to say that I believe in four persons using Trinitarian language, you would have to say that there's a fourth personal self that subsists in the being of God, a fourth subject and object of interpersonal relations, and I don't believe that's true. So does Yahweh have his own mind? I am undecided on whether mind is a property of being or a property of person. So I think it's,

I would be equally comfortable saying that there's one divine mind shared by all three divine persons, or by saying that mind being a property of person is something that each person has individually. I think either of you. Okay, but then it sounds like, so like, when I was talking with Bo Branson, when I read Augustine and read the early church fathers, it seems clear to me that they use God as a what? As like a thing that you can be. Like Sam, Preston, and Chris are human beings, right? And we all share human nature, and there is one category that is essence or nature, right, and you, all three of us have it, and so, so, like, they, they use it much more like the way

that we use the word category or type of thing, and so I hear you saying not quite like, so here's the question. Are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit parts of Yahweh? No. So then how can Yahweh be being baptized in the Jordan River, look down on someone being baptized in the Jordan River with approval, and descend upon someone being baptized in the Jordan River simultaneously? Well, first of all, if, as I said, the divine being is timeless, then Yahweh outside of time can do things at the same time as Yahweh in time is doing other things. I gave the analogy... It sounds like two Yahwehs. But it's not. Because in order for it to be two Yahwehs, you'd have to have two Yahwehs in time.

But there's not. There's the being outside of time, and there's Yahweh incarnate in the human Christ that is coming up out of the Jordan. But then you have multiple beings. I thought that your whole point is that there's one being. You don't have multiple beings, at least not multiple divine beings, multiple substances, multiple divine substances. You've got the divine substance outside of time. Multiple divine substance is a very unique phrase. I've never heard anyone say there's more than one divine substance. I'm not saying there's more than one divine substance. I'm not saying there's more than one divine substance. That's my point.

So there's the divine substance that's outside of time, according to divine timelessness, which has a great historical pedigree. And then there's the human substance in which the person of the sun subsists in time. So you've got the divine substance outside of time, the human substance inside of time, one person in which those two substances are united, those two natures are united, that's not two divine beings. It's one divine being and one human being, and the divine person of the sun subsists in them both.

So going back to what I was trying to say a moment ago to use an analogy, and you saw me talking about this on Facebook, so you kind of know what I'm getting at with this, but, you know, very often, in the mind of an author, the story that he or she tells in a novel is very real. that, you know, on a human level, and you make it a real thing where God is the divine author, and time is the story that takes place in the story he's written, there's a transcendence, a relationship of transcendence there. The whole world is not, God isn't inside of that world, he's outside of that world, he transcends it. And if that transcendent divine being, if one person in that divine transcendent being chooses to become incarnate in the story, then you've got, you don't have multiple beings, you've got one being outside in the transcendent world, who then manifests as a

different kind of being inside the world, inside that story. That doesn't mean you've got multiple gods, it just means you've got god outside of time and god as human inside of time can i clarify something real quick so so the question is so you have god the father and using classic trinitarian language god the father god the son god the holy spirit are all god and then as sam is brought up you have this concept or person of yahweh and so is yahweh the trinity or is yahweh the father is that is that a simple way of just of asking the question or is god why some is yahweh someone else entirely which is i can't help but hear that well i think you can't help but hear that so when you you say God, he or God himself, who are you talking about?

Because that is language that you use to refer about a self or a person, but you can only seemingly refer to either the father or the son or the spirit as a person. So how can you use selfhood language to talk about someone that isn't one of those three persons because we wait real quick chris can i jump can we just think we keep using the term person do you mean individual um we could assume that person could have plurality within that for the sake of the argument but individual means there's one individual right so? So would that be a better phrase? Because I think we might be using language just talking past. I don't think you're going to find any word that satisfies all parties. I use the phrase personal self.

And the best way I can imagine, Preston, you tell your wife, Chris, and obviously you're talking to your Chris not me Chris I love you with all of my very being I love you too Chris but if you said that who is the I that possesses the being right those aren't numerically identical when you say I you're not referring to your being because otherwise you wouldn't be able to say my being. There's something about personal self that subsists in being such that you can refer to my being, my soul, my mind, whatever, without just using those two things as synonyms. And what I'm suggesting is that whatever you want to call that, personal self, person, individual, hypostasis, subsistence, you know, however, and by the way, that is what the early fathers meant when they used languages like subsistence and so forth, is to say, these persons don't exist as concrete things independent from the being of God, they subsist in it. in it. So what I'm saying is that that thing, whatever you want to call it, that can speak of my being, that's what I'm calling person. And for all creatures, there's only one of those.

There's a one-to-one relationship between person and being. But so what? What prevents God from, in that way, being tripersonal? That's what I've failed to see. There's certainly nothing logically contradictory or incoherent about it. And by very definition, you have three in this language, to use the language I've been using, you've got three persons and one being. You don't have four persons or four beings. I would love to get back to the text and look at some of the passages we looked at, but Sam, do you have a, do you have any responses? I have 10,000 questions, but maybe, honestly, I've spent a lot of time reading lots of Trinitarians, both ancient ones,

medieval ones, and modern ones. And I still honestly don't really understand what you mean, Chris. You don't seem similar to any Trinitarian that I have previously interacted with. I don't really know what you mean. Well, this goes to another problem, I think, that Preston and I were discussing in the call before you got on, which is that I think the church has failed its people in that in recent generations, it has failed to instruct Christians on what the Trinity is and why we should believe it. And so it's no surprise to me that you aren't able to make sense of a lot of Trinitarians. I don't think that, I think most Christians...

I am able to make sense of most Trinitarians, even if I disagree with them. I don't really understand what you're saying. Well, I'm using really the same kind of language that you would see from a thousand years ago in, say, Thomas Aquinas. He spoke in the same way, that the persons subsist in the being of God. In fact— But he didn't— Well, and in fact, the historic—well, the Latin form of Trinitarianism, if I'm not mistaken, would say that the persons simply are— there is numeric identity between the

persons and their relationships. So they would say that the relationship of paternity, I think is the word for it, you know, being a father, that relationship is numerically identical to the person of the father, and that the relationship of filiation is identical to, numerically, the person of the Son, and these relations subsist in the being of God. This is extremely historic language I'm using. Now you're starting to sound like something that I can recognize. That's starting to sound like Aquinas and Augustine. Right, so I'm just using... But they didn't think that God himself was someone that you could talk about in personal terms like that without communicating through one

of the individual persons. I feel exactly the same way. When you say Yahweh himself, though, I feel like you either need to mean one of the three persons, or you're somehow talking about them collectively? When I say Yahweh himself, I'm referring to the being of God who can only be spoken about and to through his personal selves. You can say I'm referring to all the persons collectively as Yahweh because I'm using Yahweh to refer to each of the three persons simultaneously. However you want to catch that out, it's fine. But they're all three persons that subsist in the being of God. And if Yahweh is the proper name for any person that subsists in God, then it applies equally to all three. Okay, that was clear. That was clearer than the earth early Jerusalem. Let me know if I'm even a heretic or not, because I have not dabbled.

I mean, I've studied this in the past. I mean, I would say maybe 15 years ago in my studies in early Judaism. And it was really because there was such a pervasive view in early Judaism of plurality within God that the New Testament seems to fall right in line with an early Jewish perspective on the divine. That certainly might be. Richard Bakken's book is largely why I'm a Triggered. This book is larger than I'm a Triggered. This and the Bible too.

So it's because of my large Jewish bent in the Jewish background of the new Testament where I arrive at that. But from my understanding, and again, I don't even, I don't know if I'm violating like an early Christian creed here. So just knowing where the boundary lines are, like from my vantage point, I mean, you have like, you know, God, G O D Elohim, which is a plural term often used in the singular and say genesis one and then you have let us make god an hour or let us make man in our image you have singularity and plurality already in in a rhythmic dance in genesis one and then all

throughout genesis 2 forwarded the rest of the chapter you have yahweh Elohim Yahweh Elohim so that Yahweh becomes synonymous with this concept of God which already in Genesis 1 and 2 has some kind of allowance for some kind of plurality within that and then throughout the Old Testament you have flickers of that plurality being kind of opened up you have Daniel 7 the son of man approaching you know the ancient of days or as the septuagint has it i believe as the ancient of days like the son of man as the ancient days or to the there's just there's ambiguity in is the son of man the ancient of days is he different either way the ancient of days passes on some kind of authority that only the ancient days can possess so you have already that plurality and then books like one enoch expand on

that kind of plurality within god so that when we come to the new testament the very concept of yahweh as god is a bit flexible so that when j is distinguished from G-O-D or Theos, and yet sometimes associated with Theos and John's Gospel or even the book of Revelation, it just seems to kind of follow that trajectory. All that to say, for me, Yahweh could refer to the Trinity, depending on the context, or also in some contexts, like Theos, could single out a particular member of the Trinity. Like we see Theos in Acts 2 is clearly referring to God the Father in distinction from God the Son. But I don't think that necessarily means Theos can't also, other passages include god the son in the divine

identity how do i do is that and again i i don't i don't i don't think anyone will be chasing you with pitchforks for that okay no that that sounded that sounded great and i wholeheartedly agree you know what i've always ever since becoming a christian been struck by just how plural how plural personal if you will uh Yahweh appears to be in the Old Testament. You know, Unitarians like to dismiss this text, but the early Christians didn't. Genesis 19, 24, Yahweh rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of heaven. And it's referring here to the two ostensibly angels that had been talking to Abraham earlier at the Oaks of Mamre, the father, you know, a theophany of the father appears to remain behind and talk to Abram,

while these other two, what are ostensibly angels, go to Sodom and Gomorrah. And then this text says Yahweh rained down Sodom and Gomorrah with sulfur and fire from Yahweh out of heaven. And early Christians, as I quote in my book, said, in fact, they anathematized some of them, people who denied that the pre-incarnate son is one of these two Yahwehs. And there are other texts we could cite too, but it seems to me that, yeah, I'm in full agreement with you. There's an incredible flexibility to the personhood of Yahweh in the Old Testament, and the New Testament seems to fall perfectly in line with that. I don't accept, and I could be wrong, but I don't accept the common Unitarian refrain that somehow unipersonality is distinctively Jewish in the time of the New Testament. That just doesn't seem to cohere with the biblical and historical data to me. All right, Sam, we've been going back and forth for a while. So yeah, I would love to give you some space here to unpack some of that or respond. I'll briefly respond because I know I'm probably a little out of my depth in terms of experts on early Judaism. But I'll say that early

Judaism, like around the time of the first century, say, was diverse, right? There were the Sadducees who disagreed with the Pharisees. There was people in caves in Qumran. There was people like Philo of Alexandria who were super Platonist philosophers, right? Like, it's way more complex than most people think, obviously. Did people like Philo, in some sense, foreshadow the later developments of the Trinity? Yes, but I think that's because he's like the first example of the admixture of high Platonism with sort of Judeo-Christianity. And I think, yeah, there's like some two powers in heaven sort of Jews over there in some caves.

But I think that the main core of Judaism, especially Pharisaical Judaism, which was the kind that Jesus was most interactive with and seemingly kind of represented, especially Pharisaical Judaism, which was the kind that Jesus was most interactive with and seemingly kind of represented, even though he had strong disagreements with it, was very unipersonal in their understanding of God. And that later tradition was very anti-Trinitarian, and that was one of the main things that early Trinitarians and Jews disagreed about. And so I think you can see in the history of the interaction between the mainstream of Judaism and Christianity, that the Trinity divided Christians from Jews and didn't unite them together. So that would be my point. And

I think that that division is pretty inarguable. I would agree. I think what is arguable, however, is the reason why that divided. I think the case could be made, or at the very least, the explanation for the phenomenon that you're describing could be offered as the Jewish people that rejected the Messiahship of Christ saw those who embraced the Messiahship of Christ affirming a multi-personal Yahweh, a multi-personal God. And so that was just one of the things that they resisted in order to justify their rejection of Christ's Messiahship. In other words, their insistence upon a unipersonal God, plausibly, is something that resulted from Christianity rather than preceding it. from Christianity rather than preceding it? I would agree that Judaism in many ways was shaped by and counter-reacted to Christianity in a very similar way that Catholicism changed a

lot after the Protestant Reformation. But I would disagree that the unipersonality of God was part of that. I would think that like the early Jewish Christian groups who actually survived until the Middle Ages were very Unitarian. That's an anachronistic word, obviously. They didn't call themselves that, but they were very unipersonal in their identity of God, the early Jewish Christian groups. And so I think that the judaism with which christianity was most closely associated was very unitarian so but we should maybe finally move on to the bible i guess because honestly i'm i'm at the limit of my knowledge on that subject that's what i was going to suggest as well over the end of my skills okay yeah i've got some more because that's more more my passion lies but let's

move on um yeah let's go back to the text where do you guys what text you want to go to let's do philippians 2 man yeah that seems to be a big one yeah it is certainly a big one so i i think that that'll also show how our theology looks in action so let's um um sam why don't why don't you let's just go to let's skip ahead the chapter two verse um is it six or seven six probably start at five because it ends with christ jesus okay let's start at five and um we don't need to why don't you sam walk through the first few verses there two five and following and how you understand uh that text and i'll have uh chris give his understanding of the text because this is really a i mean as both of you know i mean there's it's there it's one of the most difficult passages in the new testament in

terms of translation of words and possible interpretations um it's also one that is really central to our discussion so uh yeah, Sam, why don't you work through this passage somewhat briefly, if you can. Yeah, briefer than Luke and I did. So if you wanted to hear more of my full thoughts on this, you could find my YouTube channel, which is called Transfigured. And one of my recent videos is me and our mutual friend Luke kind of walking through this. And we took about two hours to get

through about 60 or 70 percent of it so I'll do faster than that right now all right so I'll I'll read the main the main chunk and then give some commentary all right have in your relationships with I'm reading from the NIV actually I'm not going to read from the NIV for yeah that's not going to help you out there that one won't do me any favors I'm going to do read from the NIV for purposes. Yeah, that's not going to help you out there. That one won't do me any favors. I'm going to do the ESV, which is a little bit more literal. All right. So starting in verse 5. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,

who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. Being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,

so that the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is imploring the congregation that he's writing to, to be humble minded, as opposed to being selfish. Right, that's sort of the verses leading up to this. And this, many commentators, many translators, interpreters will say is some sort of poem or song, right? I think we all kind of agree on that. He's at least being very poetic, whether or not it was he's quoting from like an early Christian hymn that they already would have known. That's something that's controversial, or at least discussed. But anyway,

what I think this is, the main way that I would understand this is this is talking about how Jesus lived his human, earthly, incarnate, I won't say incarnate, human, earthly, fleshly life, and using that as an example to inspire the Philippians to live likewise, right? So I think that form of God, so morphe theos, so morphe is the word here for form, and it's a very rare word in the New Testament. I think it's three times, maybe it's like four or five times if you include some of the derivatives from it, but it's a very rare word. And so this is kind of where the essence of the disagreement can lie, is what exactly does form mean? And so I would understand form to mean something like role or authority or sort of the occupation that you're acting out. And the way that I would think that is because it contrasts form of God with form of a servant, right? Servant isn't an inner nature or an essence or something.

It's something that you do. It's a position on the hierarchy that you're occupying. And so what I think it's saying is that Jesus was granted by God the Father all of this power and all of this wonder working, like Jesus could call on a horde of angels, right, or legions of angels if he wanted to. But instead of walking around in pomp and circumstance, he was a humble servant, right? That's the contrast. He had this power, but he didn't use it and instead acted like a person who cared about other people more than he cared about himself. And that's exactly what Paul is imploring people to do. Have yourselves in this mind, which is also in Christ Jesus. I'll also point out a lot of Trinitarian theologians

will say that Jesus doesn't get named Jesus until he's born, right? The incarnate Jesus is not called Jesus. He is in formal Trinitarian theology often just called the Son or stuff like that. So it's have this mind of yourselves which is in christ jesus which should be a hint i think that he's talking about the human being which means that he's talking about after birth right and so he does all these things and so what's the consequence of him doing these things he then gets exalted by god and again it just says god it's not clarifying which person it is or talking about the Trinity itself or something, because he doesn't need to do that. God just means the

unipersonal God. And so God exalts him and bestows upon him a name that is above every name. So like, what name is Jesus getting bestowed on him, right? What doesn't he already have? And then at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And all of this is to the glory of God, the father. So I imagine that Jesus is subordinate to God, the father for eternity, and that Jesus is receiving the worship, praise, and adoration of all of everything, but that this is going to him and then sort of rippling up to God, sort of like in that reference to 1 Corinthians 15 that I made in my opening statement. So I'll stop there. Basically, I think it's something like

using the example of Jesus's life of servant leadership to inspire the Philippian church to do likewise with respect to the authority and power that they have. Before, Chris, before you jump in, I just want to maybe summarize this briefly, just so I understand, and maybe for my audience. So you're saying that in verse six, you have most translations say in the form of God, the NIV says, who by very nature being God, which is, I don't like that. I don't like that translation. It's taking some liberties. I'll say picking, it's picking the meaning for you. Yeah. Let's just say that Morphe means by the very nature, God, that's up to interpretation, not translation. So Morphe,

he didn't use Fusus, a term for nature, use Morphe, which may or may not have to do with nature so in who in the form so you're saying morphe if i can uh tell me if you like this that jesus here is let's just say mediating god's authority on earth but that isn't inhabiting the very essence of god because and you say because the very word morphe is used in the next verse that he's the form of the slave so in the same way he's sort of occupying the role of a slave um but it's not the essence of a slave in the same way that an actual slave would be the essence of the slave would that be a right understanding of what you're saying with yeah i think the the incarnational um interpretation

would be much stronger if it used the word physos instead of morphe, right? Which is nature, like physiology. That would be more in line with incarnational theology. And it would also be much neater if it paralleled and contrasted physos of God and physos of man, right? That would be much closer to the way that Trinitarians think that it's saying, but it's different in those two different respects. And I'll also say this, if you're in the form of God, you're not God. If you're not considering equality with God a thing to be

grasped, you're not God. God doesn't, like, why would you say about God, he didn't, God didn't consider equality with God a thing to be grasped. That's, that's, you know, that doesn't make any sense. So I think that there's a clear separation between Jesus and God here. And you see that especially in the second half when God exalts Jesus, and that the glory goes through Jesus to God. So, so that would be the essence of my translation. I could go way more into the weeds, but I'll refer you to my conversation with Luke. All right, Chris, what are your thoughts on that? Well, a number of things. First of all, it really is insignificant that he starts by referring to Christ Jesus, because he's talking

about Christ Jesus in the present. Christ Jesus in the present, by the time Paul writes this, is incarnate Yahweh. But when he turns to the form of God, he talks about the past tense. So I'm not, I don't see that as being particularly significant. As for the form of God, I already explained this in my opening. I think one big problem with Sam's reading is that it fails, I think, to account for the way form of God was used by Paul's contemporary Jews. Sam, you just said a moment ago that if you're in the form of God, you're not God, but that's demonstrably false, because you've got people like Philo and Josephus both using the form of God to refer to God himself. Philo says the form of God

is not a thing which is capable of being imitated by an inferior one, and you've got Josephus saying God is manifest in his works and benefits, but as to his form and magnitude, he is most obscure. So you've got this language in the contemporary Jews to use the form of God to refer to something that is distinctively divine. And to say that instead here means just some sort of office or authority

that's being exercised, I think fails to do justice to that. Now, you based, Sam, your reading of form on the fact that he goes on to refer to the form of a servant, and you said a servant doesn't have a central ontology. But being born in the likeness of men is parallel to taking the form of a servant. And human beings are, in fact, by nature, servants to God, the God whose nature is to rule. So there is, in fact, an essential ontology to the kind of servant that Paul is here talking about, namely, humanity, a human being. The second reason I think that Sam's reading doesn't do justice to

the text is because, again, contemporary Jews to Paul used equality with God to refer to ontological equality, not some sort of office being held by somebody in God's place or something like that. When John says in John 15 that the Jews think Jesus is making himself equal to God, he goes on to record that they go to kill him because they recognized what Jesus was doing. He says that they were wrong. No, he actually doesn't say that. That's an assumption that Unitarians make about that text, but, but we can come back to that when I'm done. So,

and then Philo said, but even, but either way, even if he said they were wrong, which he doesn't, but even if he did, he still shows that the Jews understood equality with God to refer to ontological equality.

That's not Morphine in that verse. I don't, I don't remember. No, but it is equality with God. Remember I've moved on from form to equal with God. That's okay. No, that's right. I want to make sure we distinguish there's form of God and there's equality with God, which Paul treats as practically synonymous, and which contemporary Jews used both of those two phrases, form of God and equality

with God. And my interpretation also treats those words as basically synonymous. Right, but they don't, but it doesn't treat them in the way that contemporary Jews to Paul used the language. That's my point. So when you've got contemporary Jews like Philo and Josephus and the Jews that John writes about in John 5.18, all collectively using the language of form of God and equality with God to refer to something that is distinctively and ontologically God, then to say that Paul is using it in an entirely unprecedented way and a way that goes contrary to the way his contemporaries would have used it, I think is a big problem, especially since Paul was a thoroughgoingly Jewish Christian. And then I'll just add one

more thing. The reason, a third reason, and I mentioned at least four in my opening, for doubting that Sam's reading does touch us to the text is because Paul says that being born in the likeness of men and taking the form of a servant, which are again parallels, they're the means, they're participles of means. They're the means by which Christ emptied himself. Now you can't empty yourself by becoming a human being. And he doesn't, he doesn't refer to like ordinary humans here, as opposed to say somebody born in into royalty he's just talking about humanity in general and he says that in order to be in order to empty yourself by becoming a human you have to pre-exist your humanity it's it's just simply it's simply the way that means works you can't do something by a particular means unless you pre-exist the means.

So yeah, for those reasons, and also the historical reasons I gave, namely that Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian origin and innovation, they all read the text this way, and those are all late second century fathers. I just don't see any reason for thinking that Sam, you're reading, does justice to the text. You would basically have to say that Paul is willing to use language in a wholly unprecedented way that goes contrary to the way his contemporaries used it. You would have to believe that Paul has in mind only a particular kind of human birth, even though he gives no evidence of thinking as much. evidence of thinking as much. And you would have to say that, and you would have to deny, I think anyway, that taking the form of, that being born in the likeness of men is the means by which the son emptied himself. And in fact, I think in your very way of reading it, that's exactly what you did. Because if I heard you correctly, and please do correct me if I'm wrong,

you said he was in the form of God, but did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. Being born in the likeness of man and being found in human form, he humbled himself. So what you've done, I think, is you've taken the break between those two participles and treated that as a break between the first one, which is a participle of means, and the second one, which begins a whole new thought. Now, of course, the Greek doesn't have periods and such, and so on the surface of it, that would be plausible. The problem is that the chi, translated and, appears after that second participle, and as far as I can tell, every English translation and Greek critical edition of the New Testament Greek puts the break in thought either between

being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form or even after being found in human form because there's no just there's nothing in the text that would lead you to break up those two participles in the way that i think that you've done anyway i've rambled now for a while so i'll return that we're getting really technical here in the, in the Greek and such. And I just want to be sensitive to. Yeah, sure. Well, no,

no, but I know I, I mean, as I, uh, we hear you absolutely says, and yet I want to make sure our audience isn't too lost here, but Sam,

Sam, do you have any thoughts on what Chris was saying? Um, sure. I mean, I'll say that I think that Morphe is, is a rare word. Right. And I think it's also rare even in, in the Jewish context. And I think that morphe is a rare word, right?

And I think it's also rare even in the Jewish context. And I think like even our English word form, if you were to look it up in the dictionary, it has a ton of different definitions. And if you just think about the ways that you use it in your regular life, it's a very complicated word. And I know that the English word form and the English word morphe aren't one to one the same, but they're kind of close. And so I would say that there are as many different interpretations of what morphe means as people I've talked to about this, if not more so. unprecedented way is there just aren't a lot of other precedents to compare it to.

So if he's using a rare word, then the chances are actually pretty good that it will be unprecedented if it's a multifaceted word, because there are perhaps even more meanings than there are historical references that we could compare it to. So that's what I would say about Morphe. So to kind of move on to, I would actually even say like, so I posted my conversation with Luke in the Biblical Unitarian Facebook group, and I got like three or four different Biblical Unitarian interpretations too. Mine isn't the only one, and also that there's like three or four different Trinitarian interpretations that are also disputed amongst each other. This is one of those verses that's just really hard to understand. It's hard because it uses weird words.

It's hard because it's kind of in a song or a poem, right? Like when you're reciting poetry or being poetic or something like that, you're more likely to use weird words and you're more likely to use words in weird ways, I would think is sort of part of the nature of poetry itself because you're stepping outside the bounds of part of the nature of poetry itself, because you're stepping outside the bounds of kind of just plain everyday talking. So that's one thing that I'd say. Like, one biblical Unitarian said, oh, the form of God existing is what he is now, and then it backs up and talks about the past. I'm like, oh, I hadn't totally considered that, but Chris actually kind

of alluded to something similar. The form of God actually might be what he is now as opposed to what he was on earth. Another interesting thing, a lot of people like Dale Tuggy will do the parallel and contrast with Adam here, where form of God means image of God. I don't like that because for reasons that Chris has said, there really is no precedent for form being used to mean image like that. Icon would be the more typical word. The reason why I think my passage or my interpretation works is because the precedent is within the own passage where form of a servant is something like an occupation. I think Chris was perhaps stretching it a little bit to connect form of a servant with the essence of humanity. I'll just say that I didn't find that entirely convincing. And I think that, I don't say that I didn't find that entirely convincing. And I think

that, I don't know, I'm not going to parse the Greek grammar because I'm not as good at that as you guys are, but it seems to me kind of, because it's a poem, you can chop up the clauses. And I think being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form, honestly, I'm not entirely sure why that's in there. I do see the incarnational point that it seems like a sequence, right? It seems like empties himself and then born in the likeness of men. I can see how it seems like chronology. Just to be clear, though, we're not saying it's chronology. That's why I said—

And the clauses of the and and stuff like that. Well, specifically, the participles of means is contemporaneous it's not chronological right it's it's by being born in the likeness of men that paul says christ emptied himself i i still think that that's yeah go press from a greek standpoint though i mean saying it's a participle of means that is an interpretive decision it's not like there's something intrinsic to the actual g Greek apart from interpretation that means it's a participle of means. Like that is a grammatical interpretive category, right? That's true. However, number one, as far as I know, everybody agrees that the first of those two participles is a participle of means.

And number two, whatever category of participle you want to say that is, it is the same tense as the aorist verb emptied himself. And generally, not always, but generally, when you've got an aorist participle adverbially modifying a aorist verb, an aorist indicative verb, as is the case here, those are contemporaneous. It's not chronological. So what you've got is, so I think what we're forced to say, if we want to be true to the text, is that whatever the category of participle it is, means, purpose, reason, simple temporal contemporaneousness, whatever, either way, those two things are happening at the same time. In being born in the likeness of men, Christ emptied himself. That can't work in a Unitarian reading.

That's my contention. And that's why I said the only way I think that Sam's reading of this can be held up is if you split those two participles. So you've got emptied himself taking the form of a servant, and those two things are happening at the same time. And then you leave a big pause, and you begin with being born in the likeness of men. But that's, but that's contrary to all the English translations. It's contrary to the Greek critical editions of the Greek New Testament. And there's really no justifiable reason for putting the break there unless you want to find it there. That's my contention anyway. No, that's good. Sure. I mean, I would say, look, I'm not going to be able to compete with you on Greek splicing. And so I won't be able to

get into the weeds with you on that. I would just say kind of at the highest level that I think that it's mentioning Jesus's humanity to further highlight his humility and that I don't think it's trying to communicate the way in which he emptied himself, but it's communicating about how that we can relate to him. Sam, because you said something really important. You said that Paul is trying to connect his humanity with his humility. How is anybody humble? How does anybody make a choice to be humble simply by being human? Well, I'm saying that the example is that we can relate to his humility through his humanity. Sorry, I maybe, that's really what I meant. Understood, understood. But, and this is something that you, I think, briefly mentioned in your conversation with Luke and Dale Tuggy presses it even more.

So I don't want to just, I don't want to assume that you are particularly guilty of this. I'll just say Dale is particularly guilty of this, saying that it would make no sense for Paul to offer Christ as an example of humility if what he's talking about is his incarnation, because no human being can relate to giving up one's divine nature in order to become human. But that's utterly irrelevant, because what you can, what humans

can relate to is treating equals as if they're our superiors, right? My boss is ontologically my superior, or let's put it this way, my wife is both ontologically and relationally my equal, if egalitarianism is true, and if complementarianism is true, at least we're still ontologically equal, right? But when I treat her as my superior, that is taking somebody who's my equal and treating them as my superior and i think that's exactly what paul is saying here in philippians 2 god the son though he enjoyed equality with god existing in the form of god submitted himself to the father so he's he's he's treating an equal as if he's a superior and that is fact, something that we human beings can easily relate to, just not on the divine human level, more on, you know, the human to human level. So

couldn't he treat his ontological equal as a superior without incarnating himself? I don't. Yeah, but I don't think that would be humility. That's, that's what I'm saying. It's not humble to treat somebody who's ontologically superior to you as your superior. That's just common sense. All you're doing is doing what you're supposed to do. Right. Well, that's not the way that I interpret it. I'm saying that Jesus had the ability to be a selfish, empowered leader, but instead acted as a selflessly other-focused servant leader. And that's what I think the example of humility is. And that, I think you would agree, is an example of humility.

I would agree. The problem is Jesus isn't obeying any human being by humbly submitting himself to death. Yeah, but he's obeying God, which kind of speaks to my point. But it doesn't, because we both believe that the Father's God and that Jesus is here submitting to God. But what isn't humble is obeying the one to whom you're obligated to obey, right? To obey, to be obedient. Jesus could have been disobedient, though, right? And he could have tried to usurp his Father. Sure.

And that would have been disobedient. And I think that's also sort of what's being communicated here, is that Jesus, not only did he not, like, use his power for, you know, selfishness, but he also didn't try and usurp him either. But that's not, but, right, I understand. And what I'm arguing, and what a lot of Trinitarians argue, is that that what isn't an example of humility. That's just an example of not being dumb, right? Not trying to usurp the opinion. Kind of, yes.

I mean, well, Satan certainly did the opposite, right? And Adam did the opposite. And I do sometimes think having some amount of Adam-ness to understanding like a parallel in contrast with adam is a little bit okay but well the problem of course as you know is that there's no precedent whatsoever for using this language to describe adam so i i i'm not going to go with you there but that's okay because i could be wrong i think even a trinitarian could be okay with that but you know they could they just would have vocation for doing so so so but but going back to this issue of humility, all I'm saying is, if Satan had not tried to use authority of God, etc., that wouldn't have made him humble, that would have just made

him rational. That's what we argue here, and that's what we Trinitarians often argue about. Humility and rationality aren't mutually exclusive. But they're also not synonymous. They're not synonymous, but I don't think Paul thinks it's irrational to be humble here, right? I don't either. But I do think— It's both. But, like, I'm a little bit confused because you seem to be trying to tell me that my interpretation doesn't show Jesus as being humble, but I thought we already kind of agreed that it does.

interpretation doesn't show Jesus as being humble, but I thought we already kind of agreed that it does. I'm saying it doesn't show him to be humble to the one whom the text says he is humble toward. Well, he's also obedient to God. I don't see how that's mutually exclusive with my reading. It's like both of those things at the same time. Yeah, but humility is not demonstrated in obeying an ontological superior. That's what I'm saying. I think it is. Okay. Well, that's obviously a place where we disagree.

If a sergeant obeys his general, he's both being rational and he's being humble. Well, number one, a general isn't ontologically superior to a sergeant. God is ontologically superior to a creature. And so being obedient to the creator is being rational. I don't know that I would consider that humble. You might, and that's okay. Well, I know some arrogant atheists that I'll point you to, to show you people who think that they can be arrogantly superior to their creator. And I would say they're not being humble, whereas a good Christian is humble to God, and he is our ontological superior. So I'm not quite sure exactly where you're going with this.

That's fine. So I'll just reiterate the points I made in my opening. Number one, form of God and equality of God are both phrases, terms, idioms, whatever, that contemporary Jews used to refer to God alone. So already it's not just that Paul would be doing something unprecedented with that language by using it to describe a creature. More than that, he would be using language that already refers to God's being and using it to refer to somebody who is definitionally, ontologically not God.

That's taking it to a whole other level. Number two, these participles are the – there's no indication here that he's talking about a particular kind of human, like a low man, an ordinary human, as opposed to somebody born in a lap of luxury. He's just about humanity full stop, becoming human. And number three, he says becoming human is the, at the very least, contemporaneous with his emptying himself. So the only way to make sense of this passage consistently, at least if you want to deal with the original language, is to affirm that Christ preexisted his incarnation. Hey, guys. I know we're already like two hours. I got my dinner.

I could smell my dinner upstairs just waiting for me. And we're over two hours. Sam, why don't you, can you maybe give one more response to Chris's last statement? He kind of summed up his view that he articulated at the beginning. He kind of summed it up. Do you want to give us maybe a 30-second summary of what you're saying about this passage in particular? And then I'll close this out. Sure.

So in Matthew 20, the mother of the sons of Zebedee asks if her sons can say as left and right hand. And Jesus rebukes them saying that it's not his to give, which is an interesting thing for God to say. But then Jesus says, you know that the rulers of the Gentiles lorded over them and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave. Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. This is talking about how Jesus lived his life on earth. And I think you can already hear the parallels and commonalities between that passage in Philippians 2, and I think you can already hear the parallels and commonalities between that passage

in Philippians 2. And I think that's the right way to understand what's going on here. Paul's encouraging us to imitate the way Jesus lived his life. I want to thank you both for being on the podcast. I love just the balance of, I think, grace and also forthrightness. I think you guys both raised lots of great points and just appreciate, uh, just appreciate both your postures and, um, you know, Sam, you said you didn't have any formal theological training. You don't show any evidence of that lack. Yeah. You know, I mean, the fact that you read like Ignatius, you know, in your spare time and think through, you know, uh,

Anselm or whoever else Aquinas and like, I just really appreciate, um, your thoughtfulness and desire to really think through these things. And Chris, I mean, we go a long ways back. Thank you so much for, um, it's the same thing. I mean, it's just your thoroughness and a lot of the stuff you said was off the cuff. I, you know, this wasn't scripted apart from the first few minutes, whatever. Um, but you're both of us,

both Sam and I have at least a little bit of practice in this. Yeah. Um, that's true. But thank you guys so much for being on the podcast. And yeah, you've challenged my thinking. I hope you challenged lots of other people's thinking out there in cyberspace somewhere. Well, thanks for having me on. And thank you, Sam, for a great discussion. I've really enjoyed it.

Yeah, no, thank you very much to both of you, especially Preston. I'm really thankful that you risked to talk about this topic because I know a lot of people want to, and Chris, I really appreciate your time and your earnest engagement on these topics. I can tell that you put in time and thoughtful effort into that, and I really appreciate it. And I'll think about the things that you said. And likewise, I'll think about yours as well. We'll see you next time on Theology in the Raw.