ARTICLE V.
GOD

§ 19. Unitarians believe that God is one—one being, one mind, one person, one intelligent agent, and one only, who is supremely wise, powerful, holy, and good, and whose highest attribute is love. This is the one called “Father” by Jesus and his disciples. Unitarian Christians recognize and openly acknowledge that God is genderless, but because of the limitations of language and the difficulties in describing the Deity in non-human terms, they sometimes follow the biblical convention of using masculine adjectives and pronouns to refer to God. The Unitarian belief concerning God can be expressed in the words of the New Testament:

(a) As regards God’s indivisible unity. Jesus answered, “The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord” (Mark 12:29); “We know . . . there is no God but one” (1 Cor. 8:4); “God is one” (Gal. 3:20). We find no intimation that this language was to be taken in an unusual sense, or that God's unity was a quite different thing from the oneness of other intelligent beings that were created in God’s image. 

(b) That this one God is called “Father” in Scripture. “To us there is but one God, the Father” (1 Cor. 8:6); “One God and Father of all, who is above all” (Eph. 4:6).

(c) That God is supremely holy, supremely powerful, supremely knowledgeable, and yet near and accessible to all. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Rev. 4:8); “God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything” (1 John 3:20); “He is not far from every one of us; for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:27); “For of him, and through him, and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:35); “One God…who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Eph. 4:6).

(d) That God is essentially love and loves all his creatures, both bad and good. “He that does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8); “God is love, and he that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16); “God loved the world so much that he gave his only-begotten son” (John 3:16); “Love your enemies . . . that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven: for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:44-45).

(e) That God is deserving of worship. “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4:11). However, we give honor, not merely because God is our Creator, but because we were created for good and holy purposes; we pay allegiance, not simply because God’s will is irresistible, but because God’s will is the perfection of virtue. Could we bow before a being, no matter how great and powerful, who governs tyrannically? We respect excellence, whether on earth or in heaven, and believe that in no being is the sense of right so strong, so omnipotent, as in God. We believe that the Deity’s almighty power is entirely submitted to that One’s perceptions of rectitude; and this is the ground of our piety. We venerate not only the loftiness of God’s position in respect to the creation, but the equity and goodness on which that position is established.

§ 20. God cannot be portrayed in pictures or sculptures, because God is spirit. Therefore those who worship God—according to Jesus’ teaching—must worship God in spirit and truth (Acts 17:29; John 4:24).

§ 21. The doctrine of the Trinity, as stated in the creeds of all the so-called orthodox churches, is this: that there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and that these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory, but distinguished by personal properties. Unitarians reject the doctrine of the Trinity for the following reasons:

(a) Because the doctrine of the Trinity is claimed to be derived from the Bible, but is nowhere plainly taught there. This difficult and profound doctrine, if it were so fundamental to Christianity, must have been presented by Jesus and his apostles with great clarity and precision and guarded from misconstruction with particular care. However, in the many passages that speak of God’s nature, there is not one in which we are told that God is a threefold being, or that God is three persons, or that God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In fact, the Scriptures abstain from stating the Trinity so entirely, that when Trinitarians wish to describe it, they are forced to go outside of the Bible and to invent words and phrases not found in Scripture. The Unitarian opinion is reflected well in the words of W. E. Channing: “That a doctrine so strange, so liable to misapprehension, so fundamental as this is said to be, and requiring such careful exposition, should be left so undefined and unprotected that it must be made out by inference and hunted through distant and detached parts of Scripture, this is a difficulty which, we think, no ingenuity can explain.”

(b) Because the texts quoted in support of the Trinity are inadequate or irrelevant. Scriptural passages that list the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together prove nothing except that there are a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit. Frequently, Trinitarians make their argument by showing instances where Jesus and God are described as having the same attributes or titles. But using the same logic, let us notice that in the New Testament almost every “divine” attribute claimed for Jesus is also claimed for his disciples. Was he said to “know all things”? It is also said to them, “You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things” (1 John 2:20). Is it said that he was “without sin”? It is also said of them, “Whoever is born of God does not sin” (1 John 5:18). Did Christ work miracles? He says of the believer, “Greater works than these shall he do” (John 14:12). Did God give to Christ a glory which he had before the world was? He says of his disciples, “The glory which you gave me, I have given them” (John 17:22). Did he rise from the dead to a higher life? Paul says: “If the dead are not to be raised up, neither has Christ been raised up” (1 Cor. 15:16) and “As we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” (1 Cor. 15:49). Did Christ come to judge the world? It is said of the disciples, “Do you not know that the saints shall judge the world?” (1 Cor. 6:2). Did God dwell in Christ? It is written of his followers, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16). No faith can be supported on this sort of reasoning. The Scriptural passage on which Trinitarians rely most heavily is John 1:1, which reads in most Bibles, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Most people agree that the Word refers to Jesus. What is important to note about this verse is that the first instance of “God” (theos) is preceded by the definite article (ho), whereas the second is not. The Greek language had a definite article (“the”), but it did not have an indefinite article (“a” or “an”). So when a predicate noun is not preceded by the definite article, it may be indefinite or have a qualitative meaning, depending on the context. In this case, we should understand the final clause to mean that the Word was “godlike,” “divine,” or “a god” (Compare Acts 28:6). Many unbiased translations reflect this understanding. Surely to speak of the Word as God contradicts the earlier statement that he was with God.

(c) Because there are many texts in the Bible plainly opposed to the Church doctrine of the Trinity. Such are the texts in which the Father is called the one or only God, which could not be said if the Son is also God and the Holy Spirit God: “For though there are many that are called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, (as there are many gods and many lords), to us there is one God, the Father” (1 Cor. 8:5,6); “For there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). Jesus prays to the Father, saying, “Father! The hour is come!” and immediately adds, “This is life eternal, that they might know you are the only true God” (John 17:3). He also says, “My Father, who gave me them, is greater than all (John 10:29), and then he makes it clear that he is one of the “all” when he says, “I go to the Father, for my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). The apostle directs the Ephesians to give “thanks always, for all things, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God, even the Father” (Eph. 5:20). If the Son were God, and the Holy Spirit God, it would be our duty to pray to them also. But all prayers are commanded to be addressed to the Father (See Matt. 6:9; John 4:23, 16:23).

(d) Because the Trinity teaching, said to come from Jesus, arose long after Jesus. The history of the evolution of the doctrine is well known. The Apostles’ Creed, which in its substance goes back to a very early Christian period, contains no trace of the doctrine of the Trinity. It calls God “the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” Before the outbreak of the Arian controversy, almost every theologian thought that the Son was in some sense subordinate to the Father. The original Nicene Creed (produced at the Council of Nicea in 325) took the first step and declared that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. A number of bishops were reluctant to sign the creed because of this expression, but they were coerced into doing so by an appeal to “unity.” Even so, the creed knows nothing of the Trinity. It calls Jesus “God,” but speaks of him as “God of God,” meaning “God derived from God,” and so makes his divinity derived and dependent. It was not until the year 381, after much controversy and party strife, that the doctrine of the Trinity was established in the Church at the Council of Constantinople. Immediately after the Council, Theodosius the Emperor issued an edict that decisively established this version of the Christian faith by threatening to declare anyone who did not accept it as a heretic.

(e) Because the doctrine has no other foundation. Not only is there inadequate support for the Trinity in the Bible, no valid or credible evidence in support of the Trinity doctrine outside of the Bible has ever been found.

(f) Because the doctrine is unintelligible. Although many attempts have been made to explain it, none have proved logically or philosophically satisfactory to the human mind. It therefore remains, even by the admission of its advocates, a mystery; and a mystery is something unintelligible and therefore cannot be an object of belief.

It is clear that Unitarians are no less Christian than the early followers of Jesus, who also never put Jesus on the same level as God the Father.

§ 22. Unitarians object to the doctrine of the Trinity, because, while acknowledging the unity of God in words, it subverts that unity in effect. The doctrine divides and distracts the mind in its devotion to God. It defeats the effectiveness of true monotheism, which is to offer us one object of worship, one supreme figure, one person to whom we may ascribe all goodness, in whom is concentrated all our love and vitality, and whose beautiful and venerable nature may pervade all our thoughts. True piety, when it is directed toward an undivided Deity, has a singularity and a chastity that strengthens and enriches religious reverence. But the Trinity, though claiming to represent one God, sets before us three distinct objects of the highest honor, three infinite persons having equal claim on our hearts, three divine agents each performing different roles and who are to be acknowledged in those roles and worshipped accordingly. The doctrine of the Trinity degrades God and injures devotion, not only by creating additional objects of worship, but by taking the highest affection away from the Father, who rightfully deserves such affection, and transferring it to the Son, the most attractive person in the Godhead for most Christians. People are inclined to worship a figure most like themselves, and this is where the snare of idolatry lies. A God who appears in our own form, having the same desires and feelings that we do, speaks to us more strongly than an invisible spirit in heaven, who is unapproachable in a human sense and difficult to comprehend in human terms. Veneration of Jesus as God is a form of idolatry.