Our Analysis of Appendix B to The Oneness View of Jesus Christ
This article is part of our series examining a number of David Bernard's major publications. Please click on this link if you would like to go to the list of pubications we have reviewed - Links to Bernard's other books.
Critical Response to Appendix B of The Oneness View of Jesus
"An Answer to a Critic": Bernard's Review of Boyd's Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity
In the closing pages of The Oneness View of Jesus, David Bernard steps outside his usual role as teacher and takes up the pen as a reviewer. His target is Gregory Boyd's 1992 book Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity, published by Baker Book House. The review first appeared in Forward, the United Pentecostal Church's minister's periodical, and Bernard saw fit to include it as an appendix, apparently believing it served as an adequate answer to Boyd's challenges.
It doesn't. What it does instead is offer a revealing window into how Oneness apologists deflect criticism: grant the easy points, dismiss the hard ones without engaging them, attack the critic's credibility, and end with a call for dialogue that sounds peaceable but sidesteps every real question. This response works through Bernard's review section by section, shows where he has a point and where he doesn't, and pays particular attention to the most telling moment in the whole piece: Bernard's attack on Walter Martin, which turns out to cut directly against Bernard himself.
What Bernard Gets Right
Bernard opens by crediting Boyd for stating the basic Oneness position "clearly and fairly," and for excluding several popular trinitarian arguments that don't hold up to scrutiny. He also acknowledges that Boyd's chapter presenting scriptural passages that distinguish the Father from Jesus is "perhaps the strongest chapter of the book," and that it "could help some Oneness believers develop more well-rounded terminology and thought."
These concessions are fair. Boyd's book is not a perfect work. It was written for a general Christian audience by someone who left the Oneness movement as a young man, and it shows in places. His chapter on baptism and salvation covers ground that Oneness scholars have engaged in more detail in later works. Some of Boyd's most cutting language, "the most legalistic 'Christian' movement in church history" and "salvation-by-works almost unparalleled in Christian history," reaches for the most extreme possible framing when a more measured statement would be just as damning and easier to defend.
So yes, Boyd's tone is sometimes sharper than his evidence requires. Bernard is right to note that. However, having said that, it is clear that the UPCI is extremely legalistic, very similar to the movement we left.
But that is where Bernard's fair points end. The rest of his review is a sustained exercise in deflection.
The Salvation and Works Question
Bernard calls Boyd's charges of "salvation by works" and "baptismal regeneration" unsubstantiated, inflammatory, and erroneous. He says Boyd relied on "anecdotal examples, secondary works, and unofficial sources" rather than engaging major UPCI publications that "expressly refute salvation by works, baptismal regeneration, and legalism."
The problem is that Boyd does quote major UPCI publications. And what they say is devastating.
Boyd quotes the UPCI's own published study on the standards, which states that "fellowship must be restored in order to have salvation" and that "holiness must be perfected... the responsibility for perfection lies within the individual Christian... he is the one who must perfect holiness in his own life." He quotes a UPCI tract published specifically to argue against the idea that "Grace + 0 = Salvation"; in other words, the UPCI produced a document whose explicit purpose is to argue that grace alone is not enough for salvation. The tract states that "grace merely initiates salvation" but that "obedience activates salvation."
These are not fringe voices. These are official UPCI publications. And the theology they teach runs directly against what Paul wrote to the Romans:
"Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness" (Romans 4:4-5).
If salvation is activated by obedience, then when God credits us with righteousness, he is paying a wage, not giving a gift.
Bernard doesn't interact with these quotes. He says Boyd relied on bad sources. But the sources are Boyd's exhibit A.
The tongues requirement carries the same problem. The UPCI teaches that a person has not received the Holy Spirit, and therefore is not saved, until they have spoken in tongues. As Boyd notes, this means that sincere believers who repent, trust Christ, and have their lives transformed can still be told, sometimes for years, that they are not yet saved because they haven't produced a particular physical experience on demand. If a person has to do something before God considers them to have the Spirit, then the Spirit isn't a gift. It's a reward. That's not a distortion of UPCI teaching. It is UPCI teaching, drawn from Acts 2:38 as they have twisted it.
The Galatians would recognize this problem immediately. Paul told them that adding circumcision to faith, even a single religious act, was enough to place them back under the law and cut them off from the grace of Christ (Galatians 5:2-4). Not because circumcision is wicked, but because it turns God's free gift into something you have to qualify for. The tongues requirement does the same thing, only worse, because circumcision at least takes only a moment.
Bernard's response to all of this is to say that Boyd didn't do his homework. But Bernard doesn't show us the UPCI sources that would refute Boyd's reading. He names them (The New Birth, Practical Holiness: A Second Look) but doesn't quote them. He simply asserts they say something different. That's not an answer. That's a referral.
The Holiness Standards Defense
On the question of holiness standards, particularly the requirement that women never cut their hair, Bernard's response is the most historically informed section of his review. He points out that Boyd claimed "neither the early church, nor the church throughout the ages, has ever held to the very eccentric notion that a woman should never cut her hair," and then shows this is simply false. Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and John Chrysostom all advocated that women keep their hair long, based on 1 Corinthians 11.
On this specific historical point, Bernard is right. Boyd overstated his case. The ancient church fathers did apply 1 Corinthians 11 to hair length. Bernard wins this narrow argument.
But he has answered the wrong question. Boyd's real point isn't whether some ancient teachers applied the passage a certain way. His real point is whether the UPCI is right to make these standards into requirements for staying saved. The historical parallels Bernard cites prove that other Christians have held similar views about modest dress or hair length. They don't prove that tying those views to salvation is appropriate.
Boyd's actual biblical argument about the passage is stronger than Bernard acknowledges. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul uses the word katakalupto, a word that refers to a piece of clothing worn over the head, not to hair itself. When Paul does refer to hair directly, in verse 15, he uses a different word entirely (peribolaion). That distinction matters. Paul is speaking about a head covering that women could put on or take off during worship, not about the permanent length of their hair. The whole chapter is about conduct during a worship service, not a dress code for all of life. And even if one reads the passage as being about hair length, the UPCI's application creates an absurdity Boyd identified but Bernard never answered. If "covering" means uncut hair, then Paul is saying "if a woman won't have uncut hair, she may as well also cut it." That's a statement that makes no sense at all.
Beyond the interpretation, there's a deeper issue Bernard avoids entirely. Even if the UPCI's reading of 1 Corinthians 11 were correct, the question is whether a woman's hair length determines her standing before God. The UPCI says yes, that keeping these standards is part of what it means to live in "holiness, without which no one will see the Lord" (Hebrews 12:14, a verse they apply to these rules). The Anabaptists, Quakers, and Methodists Bernard also mentions did not typically teach that wearing jewelry or cutting one's hair would cost a person their salvation. The UPCI does. That is the difference, and Bernard doesn't address it.
The Walter Martin Attack, and What It Reveals
The most telling section of Bernard's review is his attack on Walter Martin, whom Boyd quoted approvingly on the question of whether the UPCI is a cult. Bernard spends considerable space correcting Martin's errors, and some of those corrections are legitimate. Martin did misrepresent UPCI history, calling it a "Jesus Only" movement when the UPCI has long rejected that label. Martin's claim that the UPCI was "disfellowshipped" as a cult by the Assemblies of God in 1916 is historically inaccurate. These are real errors, and pointing them out is fair.
But Bernard goes further. He attacks Martin's own theology.
Martin, Bernard says, "openly denies the orthodox Trinitarian doctrines of the 'eternal Son' and the eternal generation of the Son," positions that contradict the Athanasian Creed. Bernard also charges that Martin, in a lecture against Jehovah's Witnesses, taught that the second person of the Trinity gave up his omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence in the Incarnation, reducing Jesus to a "demigod while He was on earth."
These theological charges are not invented. Martin did hold some non-standard views about the eternal Sonship of Christ, and his position on the divine attributes in the Incarnation was controversial. Bernard is within his rights to note that the man writing a book calling the UPCI a cult held some views that other trinitarians rejected.
Here is the problem: Bernard is criticizing Martin for denying the eternal Son and the eternal generation of the Son. But Bernard himself denies both.
Bernard's own Oneness theology teaches that the Son of God began to exist at the Incarnation. Before the Incarnation, there was no Son, only the eternal Father and his Word. The title "Son" refers specifically to the human side of Jesus Christ. The Father is the divine side. In Oneness theology, there is no eternal Son who was "begotten not made," as the Nicene Creed says. There is no Son who was "with the Father before all worlds," as the Athanasian Creed states. The Son, for Bernard, is a role that the eternal God took on when he became flesh in Bethlehem, nothing more.
That is not just a departure from eternal generation. It is a position more extreme than what Bernard attributes to Martin. Martin apparently held that the Son existed before the Incarnation but questioned the eternal relationship of being "generated" from the Father. Bernard holds that the Son did not exist before the Incarnation at all. Bernard is attacking Martin for a position that is less radical than Bernard's own.
Bernard accuses Martin of "deviating from the very standard to which he appeals: church tradition and majority opinion." He is right that Martin deviated from tradition. But Martin at least accepted an eternal, preexistent Christ, a real divine Son who was not merely a human role assumed in time. That much puts Martin closer to the Nicene faith than anything Bernard has ever written. Bernard's theology departs from Nicaea far more decisively than Martin's did.
This is not a minor inconsistency in Bernard's review. It is the central one. He invokes the Athanasian Creed as the standard by which Martin is judged lacking, then ignores that the same creed condemns his own view of the Son, and far more thoroughly.
"Almost Unconsciously Trinitarian": What Boyd's Observation Actually Means
Bernard closes by turning Boyd's most interesting observation into a call for peaceful dialogue. Boyd noted that Oneness believers "almost unconsciously think in Trinitarian categories," meaning that when Oneness Christians speak carefully and fully about God, they inevitably end up talking in ways that at least some trinitarians would recognize as functionally trinitarian. Bernard suggests this shows that there might be more common ground than Boyd's sharp language allows, and that dialogue between Oneness and trinitarian theologians could "erase some misconceptions" and find "surprising commonalities."
What Bernard misses is what Boyd was actually arguing.
Boyd's point is that the Trinity is not a philosophical add-on invented by third-century Greek thinkers, as Oneness theology charges. It is woven into the very fabric of the New Testament. The reason Oneness believers keep sliding back into trinitarian-sounding language is that the Bible forces them there. When they take the text seriously, when they read the Psalms Jesus quotes about himself, when they sit with John 17 long enough, when they wrestle honestly with Romans 8 distinguishing the Father who raises, the Son who died, and the Spirit who intercedes, they end up talking like trinitarians. Not because they've been corrupted by Greek philosophy, but because that's what the text says.
Boyd makes this case at length in what he calls the "inescapable Trinity." He shows that Oneness theology, in its most careful and consistent form, ends up affirming that the one indivisible God fully exists in three distinct personal ways simultaneously. And then he asks: if that is not too mysterious to believe when it is a temporary set of roles, why is it too mysterious to believe that it reflects who God eternally is? The mystery is the same either way. The only question is whether the Father, Son, and Spirit reveal God as he truly is, or whether they are costumes God wears for our benefit while his real self remains hidden behind a mask.
If the latter is true, then the God who sent his Son was play-acting, and the Son who cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" was performing for an audience. The suffering and sacrifice on the cross was a divine monologue disguised as a relationship. The prayer "Father, not my will but yours be done" was the same person talking to himself with no real distinction behind the words.
Bernard would say that the distinction was real, but only between the human and divine natures of Christ, not between two personal agents. But as Boyd shows, this framework can't explain passages like John 14:23, where Jesus uses the first-person plural: "we will come to him and make our home with him." That word "we" is not doing the work of two natures. It is doing the work of two persons who share one home together.
The fact that Oneness believers feel the pull of trinitarian language isn't evidence of common ground in the sense Bernard means. It's evidence that the Trinity is true and that no one who reads the New Testament carefully can fully escape it.
The Cult Question: Substance Over Labels
Bernard dismisses the suggestion that the UPCI might be a cult, and some of his complaints about the way the label gets used are reasonable. Martin's application of it was accompanied by historical errors. The word itself carries connotations in popular culture that go beyond its technical meaning in discussions about religious groups that depart from historic Christianity.
But the substance of the question doesn't go away just because the label is contested.
The UPCI teaches that no one who has not been baptized in the name of Jesus Christ is saved. It teaches that no one who has not spoken in tongues as evidence of the Holy Spirit is saved. It teaches that holding a Trinitarian view of God places you outside saving truth. If this is correct, then every Christian in church history before 1914 was lost, except for a handful of scattered figures who happened to hold the right baptismal formula and speak in tongues. Jonathan Edwards, Charles Wesley, David Brainerd, Amy Carmichael, C. H. Spurgeon, all lost. The church Christ promised to build (Matthew 16:18), the one the gates of death would never overcome, was apparently completely overcome and wrong about salvation for nineteen centuries.
The question is not whether the word "cult" is the right word. The question is whether a group that teaches no one outside its walls is saved, that the entire Christian church has been wrong about salvation since the third century, and that a specific baptismal formula plus a specific physical experience are requirements God will not waive, whether that group has departed from what the New Testament actually teaches about how God saves people.
The answer is yes. And the strength or weakness of Walter Martin's Greek is irrelevant to that question.
A Final Word
There is something almost sad about how Bernard ends his review. He calls for dialogue, for finding common ground, for setting aside "philosophical arguments, historical opinions, creedal formulations, nonbiblical terminology, and derogatory labels." He says the difference between Oneness and Trinitarianism is "more than semantics" while simultaneously suggesting it is perhaps less than the tone of Boyd's book implies.
But you cannot negotiate away what is actually at stake. The question is not whether Oneness and Trinitarian Christians can find a warmer way to talk to each other. The question is whether God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three distinct but inseparable persons in one God, or whether he is a single divine person who took on three roles in time. One of those positions is true. They cannot both be true.
And if the Trinity is true, then the UPCI's understanding of salvation is in serious error. It has tied eternal life to a formula God never required. It has made the gift of the Holy Spirit into a prize that sincere, repentant, Christ-trusting people must somehow earn. It has told people who belong to Christ that they don't, and told them who are free that they're not.
That is worth more than a call for dialogue. It is worth a clear answer from the Bible, which Boyd provided, and which Bernard's review, for all its sharp edges, never really addressed.
This article responds to Appendix B of David K. Bernard, The Oneness View of Jesus (Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1994). Primary counter-sources: Gregory A. Boyd, Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992); Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology; Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology.*
Footnotes