"Some Oneness writers have gone so far as to say, “To say that God is three persons and find substantiation for it in the Scripture is a work in futility. There is literally nothing in the Bible that supports God being three persons.” However, as the Church throughout the ages has seen fit to reject the modalistic presentation, there must obviously be some reason for this. Such reason is found in the teaching of Scripture itself. The Bible presents a number of categories of evidence that demonstrates the existence of three Persons all sharing the one being that is God. First, the Persons are described as personal; that is, the attributes of personhood and personal existence are ascribed to the three. Secondly, clear distinctions are made between the Persons, so that it is impossible to confound or confuse the three. The second Person, the Son, is described as being eternal (as is the Spirit, but in this context, given the denial of the eternal nature of the Son by the Oneness position, and the acceptance of the eternality of the Spirit by the same group, this point is more tangent to the issue) and is differentiated in this pre-existence from the Father. Finally, we see real and eternal relationships between the Persons (the opera ad intra.) One of the characteristics of personal existence is will. Few would argue the point in relationship to the Father, as He obviously has a will. So too, the Son has a will, for he says to the Father in the Garden, “not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26:39) The ascription of will to the Persons indicates the ability to reason, to think, to act, to desire – all those things we associate with self-consciousness. As we shall see later, there is a difference between nature and person, and one of those differences is the will. Inanimate objects do not will; neither do animals. Part of the imago dei is the will itself." (https://www.aomin.org/aoblog/oneness-pentecostalism/the-trinity-the-definition-of-chalcedon-and-oneness-theology/)
James R. White wrote these words in April of 1988. He claims that there are three wills in God, and also that will is a property of person, rather than a property of nature. This also leads to the Monothelite heresy. This is why I no longer endorse Dr. White's debates or his writings, because of statements like this. If the Reformers or Puritans were alive today, they would have condemned White as a heretic. For the past few years, I use to recommend White's materials to people, but I can no longer do that in good conscience due to White's beliefs about the Trinity that are unorthodox.
In a 2011 debate with the Unitarian heretic Roger Perkins, James White openly states (in front of a crowd of people, who think that White is representing the traditional Trinitarian position) that there are three centers of consciousness of God, which also demonstrates White's misunderstanding of what defines divine personhood (the biblical and historically orthodox definition of which is "an individualization of a rational nature", which was adopted by Boethius and Aquinas) and the term hypostasis.
No comments:
Post a Comment