Trinity

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TRINITY & OTHER DOCTRINES OF GOD: PROF. M. M. NINAN APPENDIX 3 Modern Christian groupings • American Unitarian Conference started as a reply to Unitarian Universalism becoming 'too theologically liberal'. They refrain from social activism and believe religion and science can improve the human condition. • Associated Bible Students believe that the Father is greater than the Son in all ways, and that the Trinity doctrine is unscriptural. They hold to beliefs similar to Jehovah's Witnesses. • Christadelphians hold that Jesus Christ is the literal son of God, the Father, and that Jesus was an actual human (and needed to be so in order to save humans from their sins). The "holy spirit" terminology in the Bible is explained as referring to God's power, or God's character/mind. • Church of God General Conference (Abrahamic Faith). • Cooneyites are a nontrinitarian Christian sect who split off from the Two by Twos sect in 1928 following Edward Cooney's excommunication from the main group. Cooneyites deny the Living Witness Doctrine; they have congregations in Ireland, England, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. • The Iglesia ni Cristo (Tagalog for Church of Christ) view is that Jesus Christ is human but endowed by God with attributes not found in ordinary humans, though lacking attributes found in God. They further contend that it is God's will to worship Jesus. INC rejects the Trinity as heresy, adopting a version of unitarianism. • Jehovah's Witnesses teach that only God the Father, Jehovah, is the one true almighty God, even over his Son. They consider Jesus to be "the First-begotten Son", God's only direct creation, and the very first creation by God. They give relative "worship" or "obeisance" (homage, as to a king) to Christ, pray through him as God's only high priest, consider Jesus Christ to be Mediator and Messiah, but they believe that only the Father is without beginning, and that the Father is greater than the Son in all things; only Jehovah the Father therefore is worthy of highest worship or "sacred service". They believe that the Son had a beginning, and was brought forth at a certain point, as "the firstborn of all creation" and "the only-begotten". They identify Jesus as the Archangel Michael, mentioned in the Bible at Jude 9. They believe he left heaven to become Jesus Christ on earth, and that after his ascension to heaven he resumed his pre-human identity. This belief is partly based upon 1 Thessalonians 4:16, in which "the voice of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ is described as being that of an archangel". They also cite passages from the books of Daniel and Revelation in which Jesus and Michael take similar action and exercise similar authority, concluding these scriptures indicate them to be the same person. They do not believe that the Holy Spirit is a person, 159
TRINITY & OTHER DOCTRINES OF GOD: PROF. M. M. NINAN but consider it to be God's divine active force. • The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often referred to as Mormonism, teaches that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct beings that are not united in substance, a view sometimes called social trinitarianism. Members of this church believe the three individual deities are "one" in will or purpose, as Jesus was "one" with his disciples, and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitute a single Godhead or a Divine Council, and are united in purpose, in manner, in testimony, in mission. Because their official belief is that the Father, Son, and Spirit are each "Gods" in one Godhead, Mormonism is said to hold a form of tri-theism. Some view Mormonism as a form of Arianism. Like Arianism, Mormons believe that God created Christ, that he is subordinate to God the Father and that Christ created the universe. However, Mormon doctrine varies significantly from the teachings of Arius. Mormons also do not subscribe to the ideas that Christ was unlike the Father in substance, that the Father could not appear on earth, nor that Christ was adopted by the Father, as found in Arianism. Mormons assert that the classification of deity in terms of a substance was a post-apostolic corruption, and that God differs from humans not in substance, but in intelligence. While Mormons regard God the Father as the Supreme Being and literal Father of the spirits of all humankind, they also teach that Christ and the Holy Spirit are equally divine in that they share in the Father's "comprehension of all things". • The Church of God International believes in the divinity of Christ but rejects the doctrine of Trinity. They believe in what appears to be a Subordationist viewpoint in which Jesus Christ, is the Father's only Begotten Son (in Romanized Greek: monogenestheos, meaning "only-begotten god"). • Oneness Pentecostalism is a subset of Pentecostalism that believes God is only one person, and that he manifests himself in different ways, faces, or "modes": "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost) are different designations for the one God. God is the Father. God is the Holy Spirit. The Son is God manifest in flesh. The term Son always refers to the Incarnation, and never to deity apart from humanity."[38] Oneness Pentecostals believe that Jesus was "Son" only when he became flesh on earth, but was the Father prior to his being made human. They refer to the Father as the "Spirit" and the Son as the "Flesh". Oneness Pentecostals reject the Trinity doctrine, viewing it as pagan and unscriptural, and hold to the Jesus' Name doctrine with respect to baptisms. Oneness Pentecostals are often referred to as "Modalists" or "Sabellians" or "Jesus Only". • The Sabbatarian tradition (Armstrongism) believe that Christ the Son and God the Father are co-eternal, but do not teach that the Holy Spirit is a being or person. Mainstream Christians characterise this teaching as the heresy of Binitarianism, the teaching that God is a "Duality", or "two-in-one", rather than three. Armstrong theology holds that God is a "Family", that expands eventually, that "God reproduces Himself", but that originally there was a co-eternal "Duality", God and the Word, rather than a "Trinity". • Swedenborgianism holds that the Trinity exists in one person, the Lord God Jesus Christ. The Father, the being or soul of God, was born into the world and put 160
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