Debate - Dr. Dale Tuggy vs. Dr. Michael Brown - Is the God of the Bible the Father Alone?

Subject

Dr. Dale Tuggy (Biblical Unitarian) and Dr. Michael Brown (Trinitarian) debate the subject 
“Is the God of the Bible the Father Alone?” 

• Dale Tuggy defends that there is only one who is the eternal God – the Father himself. 
• Michael Brown proposes that there are three who are one God. 

Watch the debate and judge for yourself. This debate took place on January 11, 2019 in Concord, North Carolina.

Video of the Debate - 2hr45mins

Click this link to watch

Dr Dale Tuggy's Opening Statement

January, 11th 2019

I want to thank Kingdom of God Ministry & Missions for organizing and sponsoring this debate. Other sponsors include 21st Century Reformation, Restoration Fellowship, and the Church of God General Conference, which is the denomination of my church, Higher Ground Church in White House, TN. Finally, my thanks to Dr. Brown for being willing to debate this important topic, and to FIRE church for hosting this event.

I was born into an independent Charismatic church in 1970, and born again and baptized in that church in 1978, and it is an honor for me to be here with you.

My thesis is that the God of the Bible is not the Trinity because the God of the Bible is the Father alone. The NT is just as monotheistic as the OT. But it also tells us who this one God is, and contrary to catholic traditions, in the NT the one God is not the Trinity. In the New Testament this one God is the one Jesus referred to as “Our Father in heaven,” the one Paul calls “God the Father.” [1]
In the NT the one God just is the Father, and the Father just is the one God: “they” are one and the same. This is the defining thesis of unitarian Christian theology, and it is contradicted by any trinitarian theology.

A trinitarian thinks that the one God is the tripersonal god. But no one thinks that the Father is tripersonal. The trinitarian says the one God is the Trinity, and so the Father gets demoted to being in some sense one third of God, whether a part of God, a personality of God, a mode of God, or a “Person” within God. The trinitarian’s theory requires that the one God is not numerically the same as the Father – but rather, he must distinguish the one God, the tripersonal god, from the Father. But here, fourth-century speculations clash with plain NT teaching.

We can observe this identification of the one God with the Father in every NT author. They rarely state this commitment, because it was not then disputed. But occasionally they express it clearly. In John 17:1-3 Jesus reveals his belief that the Father is “the only true God.” If the Father is the only true God, then no one else is! And in 1 Corinthians 8, Paul tells us that while the pagans believe in various gods, as far as Christians are concerned, there is “one God, the Father.” In John 8:54 Jesus says to his Jewish opponents, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, he of whom you say, “He is our God…” Right – the God of the Jews, the only God in both OT and NT is the one Jesus calls
“my Father.” [2] In Acts the message preached to the Jews is that “the God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus.” [3]

In Judaism, and in the NT, the one God is understood not to be a human being, [4] but rather a God, in fact, the only God.
In contrast, Jesus is everywhere in the NT portrayed as a real man.
In John 8:40 Jesus describes himself as “a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God.” The NT Jesus is not God; rather, he is God’s Messiah, his special human agent, called “the Son of God.” Paul writes to Timothy that “there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” [5] and this one God, Paul thinks, is the Father. [6]

The NT explicitly states seven times that the Father is Jesus’s God. [7] And Jesus is portrayed as calling the Father “my God” in seven other places. [8] These “Father-as-Jesus’s-God” texts are not the subject of significant interpretive, translation, or textual disputes.
In the NT, like you, Jesus is subject to the unique God, the Father. [9] Thus, Jesus is not taught to be the same god as the Father, or any god at all; there is only one God, the Father, and he is, Paul says, “the head of” Jesus, his Christ. [10]

I want to spend the rest of my opening statement comparing two hypotheses in the light of six indisputable facts about the New Testament. [11] The two hypotheses are,

1. first, that these authors believe the one God to be the Father alone, and 
2. second, that they think the one God to be the Trinity. 

If a fact is just what we would expect given the truth of one hypothesis, but it would be a surprise given the truth of the rival hypothesis, then that fact confirms the one hypothesis over the other. Notice that this procedure does not presuppose unitarian theology, or any controversial thesis whatever.

Fact #1 All four gospels feature a “human being” compatible main thesis.

This is the thesis that Jesus is God’s Messiah. While this thesis is plainly and repeatedly stated throughout these books, it is highlighted at certain key moments. In the first three gospels, Jesus privately asks his disciples who they think he is, and their leader Peter replies: “You are the Messiah.” [12] And towards the end of the fourth gospel, John states his main thesis: “these [signs] are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” [13]

Wait... that’s it? Nothing about Jesus being God, God the Son, having a divine nature, or being the “godman,” or the second Person of the Trinity? This simple thesis only mentions the man Jesus’s uniquely important role as God’s Messiah, saying nothing at all about his deity. It’s what we’d expect if the author thinks the one God just is the Father, but it is not at all what we’d expect if he were a trinitarian. This confirms that these authors are unitarians, not trinitarians.

Fact #2 In the New Testament, the word “God” nearly always refers to the Father, 

while no word there refers to the Trinity.

If the NT authors were trinitarians, we’d expect them to sometimes use the word “God” to refer to the Trinity – but they never do. And we’d expect them to somewhat spread the title “God” around between the three, often calling the Son or the Spirit “God,” in addition to the Father.

But this is not what we see. In the NT, “God” is nearly always the Father; all textual scholars agree on this. In a small handful of cases, no more than eight in the whole NT, it can be argued that “God” refers to the Son. [14] But we know that in biblical terminology, a human who is subject to God can be referred to or addressed using the title “God”! Jesus makes this very point in John 10:34, quoting Psalm 82; we also see it in
Hebrews 1:8-9, quoting Psalm 45. While many latter-day readers suppose that only the one God should be called “God,” biblical authors don’t assume this.

Even so, all NT authors are very stingy about applying the word “god” to anyone other than the Father. This would be very surprising if they were trinitarians, but it’s just what we’d expect if they hold that the one God is the Father alone.

It is vanishingly unlikely that the NT authors believed in a triune God and yet had no word or phrase by which to refer to that god. The very first thing a trinitarian will do is to coin a word or phrase to refer to the triune God as such. They needn’t use the word “Trinity.” They could just coin a new use of the word “God,” or they could talk of “the heavenly three,” or “the triple God,” “or the divine three.” But we don’t see any term or phrase in Bible which was then understood to refer to a tripersonal God.

These authors’ lack of any word or phrase for the Trinity is exactly what we’d expect if they instead held the one God to be the Father alone. In sum, NT God-terminology reflects their thinking that the one God is the Father, and so not the Trinity.

Fact #3 In the New Testament only the Father and the man Jesus are worshiped.

One would expect trinitarian authors to authorize, model, or portray worship of the Trinity as a whole, or at least worship of all three Persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. But there are exactly two objects of religious worship in the New Testament: God, and the human son of God. This is plainly seen in Revelation 4 and 5.

One might worry that two objects of worship means two gods. But Paul explicitly teaches in Philippians 2:11 that:

the worship we give to the exalted Jesus is “to the glory of God the Father.” Jesus is not a second god, rivaling God. Rather, he is God’s human Son, and it honors God when we worship Jesus. 

His exaltation to God’s right hand implies that all must worship him – not “as God,”
or confusing him with his and our God, but rather, as the exalted Son of God.

It is not a case, as Paul says in Romans 1:25, of worshiping “the creature rather than the Creator.” Jesus, being a man, is a creature, yes, but in worshiping him we thereby worship the Creator,  the one God, who raised and exalted him.

This pattern of worship would be quite a shock if the NT authors were trinitarians. First, we’d expect to see the Holy Spirit worshiped at least once! Second, we’d expect the Son to be an ultimate object of worship, like God, so that worshiping him isn’t to the glory of any other. Third, we’d expect to see the triune God worshiped somewhere, anywhere. But it never happens. Nor do we see the later trinitarian idea that the Father and the Son are two “Persons” within God, so that they should somehow count as the same god. The actual NT pattern of worship disconfirms the theory that the NT authors are trinitarians, and like our other facts, confirms that they are unitarians.

Fact #4 That God is triune or tripersonal is never a clear assertion of any passage in the NT; core Jewish theology is always assumed.

In the gospels Jesus is an extremely confident and opinionated man, who taught “as one having authority.” [15] If he had believed there needed to be a correction or addition to standard Jewish teaching about God, we’d expect him to say so. But he never gets around to telling us that God is three Persons in one essence. In conversation with one of his fellow Jews in Mark 12 Jesus simply quotes the famous Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4, the statement that God is unique – and he gives no hint that Jews of his day misunderstood it. John tells us that God’s eternal word comes to us most fully in this man, [16] and Paul tells us that Jesus is the very “wisdom of God.” [17] I suggest that we take Jesus seriously as a theologian. He teaches that God is our and his Father, [18] but he never teaches that God is a Trinity.

Neither do Paul, John, Peter, or the author of Hebrews make this a teaching point. They teach at length about resurrection, the second coming of Jesus, food sacrificed to idols, and how Christians should behave. But at no point do they inform us that Jewish monotheism is somehow too stingy, because finally it can be told that God is multipersonal. This would be a shocking omission for trinitarian authors; but these are not trinitarian authors.

Fact #5 There is no trace of any first century controversy 

about whether or not Christian theology is truly monotheistic.

Everywhere trinitarian theology goes, it creates controversy, particularly at first, and especially when interacting with rival monotheistic religions like Judaism and Islam. Its opponents commonly denounce it as confused, tritheistic, not a genuine variety of monotheism, or as akin to pagan polytheism. After all, the Nicene creed describes the Son and Father as “true God from true God,” which sounds like two gods. But no such controversy occurs in the first Christian century. The reason is that there were not any trinitarians at that time!

The main NT-era controversies are about whether or not Jesus is God’s Messiah, and whether or not as Paul taught non-Jews could be fully acceptable to God without full Torah observance. But there is no whiff of any controversy about God being multipersonal.

If Christians in the NT era were trinitarians, this would be very surprising. How could their Jewish opponents fail to notice? But it’s exactly what we’d expect to see if back then Christians thought that the one God is the Father alone.

Fact #6 No New Testament author lifts a finger 

to limit or qualify clear implications of the Son’s limitations.

NT writings explicitly assert that Jesus got his mission, authority, message, and power from God. [19] No writer shows any embarrassment about Jesus’s dependence on God in these ways, even though for a Jew, God does not take orders from anyone, and does not get his authority, message, or power from any other! Nor do these authors make the convoluted distinctions beloved by some trinitarians – that Jesus was subordinated “as man” but not “as divine.”

Moreover, Jesus tells us that he didn’t know the day or hour of his future return, although God did. [20] These authors are unembarrassed to imply that Jesus at that time knew less than God. Hence their consistent portrayals of him as learning, asking questions, and even feeling anxious about what is going to happen. [21] Like us, the NT Jesus puts his faith and trust in God. [22] They even quote him, without comment, as implying that God is good is some way that Jesus is not. [23]

Again, the NT is explicit that God is immortal, [24] whereas the man Jesus died. [25] Happily, his God then raised him and made him immortal. [26] In contrast, we should see that God is essentially immortal, and this is not because of any other.

The NT always portrays Jesus as a real man. He has a real human mother, although according to Matthew and Luke, not a human father. Rather, God miraculously made Mary pregnant. Jesus, the angel in Luke 1:35 says, is “begotten” in Mary by God. As with ordinary human reproduction, it is assumed here that Jesus was brought into existence at some point in this miraculous pregnancy;
he’s not portrayed as traveling from some other realm to enter Mary’s womb.

But the one God, by definition, is eternal; he never began to exist. How can these authors sit back while the reader infers that Jesus came to exist in this miraculous pregnancy? Notably, no NT author shows any concern to assert the eternal existence of the Son of God. Unlike partisans of the Nicene creed since the 4th Christian century, NT authors don’t say anything to rule out that Jesus came into existence.

...

All these apparent limits on Jesus are simply left to stand in the NT. This is wildly unlikely if the authors are trinitarians. But it makes sense if they simply had no need to argue for “the deity of Christ” – because like other Jews, they believed in exactly one deity, God the Father.

We should be good Protestants, and reject even old and prestigious human traditions when they conflict with clear biblical teaching. There is a such a conflict here; the Bible teaches that the one God is the Father alone. Later traditions since the late 300s AD have said that the one God is not the Father, but rather the Trinity. So much the worse for those traditions. Let’s learn our theology from the Lord Jesus and his hand-picked apostles.

Footnotes

1 Compare: Malachi 2:10 (NRSV) “Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us?”
2 For more scriptural evidence and argument see “podcast 248 – How Trinity theories conflict with the Bible,”
https://trinities.org/blog/podcast-248-how-trinity-theories-conflict-with-the-bible/ .
3 Acts 3:13, NRSV.
4 “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfil it?” Numbers 23:19 (RSV)
5 1 Timothy 2:5, NASB.
6 1 Timothy 1:2. [1 Corinthians 8:6]
7 Romans 15:6; 2 Corinthians 1:3; 2 Corinthians 11:31; Ephesians 1:3, 17, 3:13; 1 Peter 1:3.
8 Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46; John 20:17; Revelation 3:12 (four times).
9 “Jesus said to [Mary Magdalene], ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them,
‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” (John 20:17, NRSV)
10 “But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ.”
1 Corinthians 11:3, NRSV.
11 For some other relevant facts see “podcast 189 – The unfinished business of the Reformation,”
https://trinities.org/blog/podcast-189-the-unfinished-business-of-the-reformation/.
12 Mark 8:29; Compare: Matthew 16:15, Luke 9:20.
13 John 20:30-31, NRSV.
14 Murray Harris, Jesus as God; Harris concludes positively about the following seven passages that many have thought referred to Jesus as theos: Harris' conclusions are:
Certain – John 1:1, John 20:28, Romans 9:5;
Very Probable – Titus 2:13, Hebrews 1:8, 2 Peter 1:1; Probable: John 1:18. (p. 272)
He rules out Acts 20:28 and 1 John 5:20.
15 Matthew 7:29.
16 John 1.
17 1 Corinthians 1:24.
18 John 20:17.
19 E.g. John 5:30; Matthew 9:8; John 17:8; John 14:10; Luke 4:18.
20 Mark 13:32; Matthew 24:36.
21 Luke 2:52; Mark 5:31; Mark 14:32-36.
22 Luke 1:5-20; Luke 1:26-38; Luke 10:16; Hebrews 12:1-4; Hebrews 2:13; Luke 8:43-48;
Matthew 27:27-44; Luke 4:16-30; Luke 5:16; Mark 14:32-42; Philippians 2; John 5:19; John 10:30;
John 19:30; John 8:40; Matthew 21:18-22; Matthew 17:14-20; Matthew 8:23-27; Mark 4:35-41;
Matthew 24:36; Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5; Acts 5:31; 2 Peter 1:4; Mark 11:15-17.
23 Mark 10:18.
24 1 Timothy 1:17; Romans 1:23; 1 Timothy 6:16.
25 Matthew 27:50; Mark 15:37; Luke 23:46; John 19:30; Acts
26 Acts 2:24, 32, 3:15, 26, 4:10, 5:30, 10:40, 13:30, 37; Romans 10:9; 1 Corinthians 15:15;
Galatians 1:1; Ephesians 1:20; Colossians 2:21; 1 Peter 1:21.
On his being given immortality see 1 Corinthians 15:26, 42, 53. I assume that the saints will receive the same benefit in this regard as
the “firstborn from the dead.” (Colossians 1:18, Revelation 1:5)

Please note: some editing has been performed