The Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ (doctoral thesis)
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 The Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ by David Bernard
This book is different from Bernard's earlier works in that it is a doctoral thesis. His other books on church history argue that Trinitarianism was invented by councils and philosophers, not received from the apostles. This one goes to the source: the letters of Paul. Specifically, it focuses on 2 Corinthians 3:16-4:6 and asks what Paul actually believed about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Bernard does this by engaging mainstream New Testament scholarship, including Trinitarian scholars whose conclusions, he argues, support a Oneness reading better than a Trinitarian one.
Because this is new territory for Bernard, most of the arguments here are genuinely different from what he has written elsewhere. The arguments below respond only to what is new in this volume.
"Trinitarian Scholars Prove Oneness Better Than They Know"
Bernard's most creative move in this book is to borrow the arguments of three prominent Trinitarian scholars, Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, and James Dunn, and use them against Trinitarianism. All three agree that the earliest Christians worshiped Jesus as divine while still considering themselves Jewish monotheists. Bauckham calls this "christological monotheism." Hurtado calls the early pattern of devotion to both Father and Son "binitarian." Dunn argues Paul saw Jesus as the fullest possible expression of the one God of Israel. Bernard says: exactly. That is what Oneness Pentecostals have been saying all along. Jesus was not a second divine person; he was the one God revealed in human form.
The observation these scholars make is real. Paul does apply Old Testament texts about Yahweh directly to Jesus. He describes Jesus in terms that Jewish scripture reserved for God alone. That is not a disputed point. What is disputed is what that means about the nature of God.
Bauckham, Hurtado, and Dunn do not conclude that Paul was Oneness. They conclude that Paul understood Jesus to be genuinely distinct from the Father while being fully God. Bauckham's argument is specifically that Jesus is included within the "divine identity" as Scripture describes it, not that Jesus simply is that identity without remainder. Hurtado distinguishes the object of devotion (Father and the risen Lord Jesus, together) from a single God manifesting in two modes. Dunn, the most cautious of the three, resists the idea that Paul's Adam-and-Wisdom Christology requires the preexistence of a second person, but even Dunn does not deny that the risen Jesus is genuinely distinct from the Father.
Bernard takes their evidence and draws a conclusion they explicitly reject. The reason they reject it is not because they are philosophically committed to fourth-century categories. It is because the New Testament itself draws distinctions that simple identification cannot explain. The Father sends the Son (Gal 4:4). The Son prays to the Father (Mark 14:36). The Father raises the Son (Rom 6:4). The Son intercedes with the Father for believers (Rom 8:34). These are not descriptions of a single actor playing different roles; they are descriptions of a genuine relationship between two who are distinct. Bernard needs to explain those texts, not just the ones where Jesus is called Lord. He can use Bauckham and Hurtado to show that Jesus was worshiped as fully divine. He cannot use them to erase the personal distinction between the Father and the Son that runs throughout Paul's own letters.
"Paul's Christology Was Functional, Not Trinitarian"
Bernard argues that Paul described Jesus in terms of what Jesus did, not in terms of eternal relationships within the Godhead. Paul said Jesus was the image of God, the glory of God, the Lord (Yahweh) revealed in human form. These are descriptions of Jesus' role and function as God's self-revelation. They do not require, Bernard says, the Trinitarian teaching of three coequal, coeternal persons who are consubstantial with each other. The Trinity is a later philosophical construction, built on Greek categories that Paul did not use.
The distinction between function and being is real, and Bernard is right that Paul did not produce a systematic doctrine of the Trinity. Paul's letters are occasional writings, not a theological textbook. He did not sit down to describe the inner life of God in abstract terms.
But "functional" and "ontological" are not opposites here.[1] When Paul says, "in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Col 2:9), that is not a functional claim about what Jesus does. It is a claim about what Jesus is. When Paul writes that Jesus was "in the form of God" before the Incarnation and "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped" (Phil 2:6), he is describing a status that existed before Jesus did anything in human history. That is an ontological claim, not merely a functional one.
Furthermore, Paul's letters consistently distinguish between the Father and the Son in ways that go beyond functional roles. He gives thanks to "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Cor 1:3; Eph 1:3). He describes the Son as delivering the kingdom to the Father at the end of all things, "that God may be all in all" (1 Cor 15:24-28). The Father knows the day and the hour that the Son does not know (Mark 13:32). These distinctions appear not as role differentiation in the drama of salvation but as real differences between two persons. A God who delivers the kingdom to himself and a Spirit who intercedes with himself before himself is a God doing elaborate theater, not a God actually in relationship with himself, with us, or with his creation.
The Trinity is not a Greek imposition on Paul's Hebrew thought. It is the most natural reading of what Paul actually wrote when you take all of it together.
"Paul Identified Jesus Directly with the Holy Spirit"
This is the most specific new argument in the book, and it deserves the most direct response. Bernard devotes the entire sixth chapter to 2 Corinthians 3:17: "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." He argues that "the Lord" here is Jesus, and "the Spirit" is the Holy Spirit, so Paul is explicitly identifying the two. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the same person. This, Bernard says, is the clearest statement of Oneness theology in Paul's letters.
Bernard has significant scholarly company on the part of this interpretation. A number of New Testament scholars, including Dunn, have observed that Paul does occasionally use "mn n bn Christ" and "Spirit" interchangeably in ways that are difficult to pin down precisely. Romans 8:9-11 is the standard text: Paul moves in three consecutive verses from "the Spirit of God" to "the Spirit of Christ" to "Christ in you," language that does sound interchangeable. Bernard is not making this up.
The question is what "interchangeable" means. There are two very different possibilities. The first is that Jesus and the Spirit are literally the same individual, so that there are not three persons in God but only one. The second is that Jesus and the Spirit are so closely united in their work that Paul can describe the Spirit's indwelling presence as Christ's own presence, without meaning they are the same person. This is the way Trinitarian theology has always read the passage.
The context of 2 Corinthians 3:17 matters here. The passage is drawing on Exodus 34, the scene of Moses before the Lord. When Paul says "the Lord is the Spirit," his most immediate point is that the Lord of the new covenant is the Spirit-giving Lord, not the letter-giving one. The contrast is between the old covenant that kills and the new covenant that gives life through the Spirit (3:6). The Spirit's role in the new covenant is inseparable from Jesus because the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. That is a claim about the source and character of the Spirit, not a claim that the Spirit and Jesus are numerically the same individual.
The rest of Paul's letters make a simple identification impossible. In Romans 8:26-27, the Spirit intercedes for believers, and "he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit." This is a three-way relationship: the Spirit intercedes, and the Father (who searches hearts) knows the Spirit's mind. You cannot have the Father knowing the mind of someone who is actually the Father himself under a different name. In John 14:16, Jesus says he will ask the Father, and the Father will send "another Comforter." The Greek word for "another" there means another of the same kind, a second one, not the same one again. The Spirit is another advocate alongside Jesus, not Jesus under a new label. And in Romans 8:34, Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father interceding for us, while the Spirit is simultaneously interceding within us (8:26). Two intercessions, happening at the same time, in two different locations, for two different but related reasons.
If Paul identified Jesus and the Spirit as literally the same person, he wrote in a way that makes that identification incoherent. That should make us pause before committing to the Oneness reading.
"Paul's 'Twoness' Language Is About the Incarnation, Not Eternal Persons"
Bernard makes a sophisticated argument toward the end of the book. He says that when Paul distinguishes between Jesus and God, he is describing the relationship between Jesus' humanity and Jesus' deity, not the relationship between two eternally distinct divine persons. The reason Jesus prays to the Father, submits to the Father's will, and is raised by the Father is that Jesus is a real human being. The twoness in Paul is the twoness of the Incarnation: one God who has taken on genuine human nature, which involves dependence, obedience, and even death.
Bernard credits this view to Karl Rahner, who noted that when Jesus prayed as a man, he was, objectively speaking, praying to the entire Trinity, including to the eternal Son. Bernard then uses Occam's razor: the simpler explanation is that Jesus was praying to God, full stop. Why posit a second divine person when the distinction can be explained by the Incarnation?
The argument is more elegant than it first appears, but it has a problem that multiplies the further you push it.
If all the Father-Son distinction in the New Testament is explained by the Incarnation, then the Incarnation turns out to be God speaking to himself, praying to himself, sending himself, and being raised by himself. That is not a minor puzzle to tuck away. It is a fundamental incoherence. Genuine prayer involves an address that goes somewhere other than the one praying. Genuine sending involves a sender who is different from the one sent. Genuine love between Father and Son (John 3:35; 17:24) involves two persons who can actually love each other.
Bernard's reading requires what is sometimes called "theatrical theology," God acting out different scenes for the benefit of the audience without the scenes involving any real relationships. The Father says "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matt 3:17) while being the one he is saying it to, about himself. Jesus cries out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34) while being God himself, forsaking himself. That reading evacuates those moments of their actual meaning.
The simpler explanation of the data, contrary to Bernard, is the Trinitarian one. Jesus prays to the Father because he is genuinely distinct from the Father. He is fully God, but he is not the Father. He submits his human will to the Father's will because he is a real human, yes, but the one he submits to is a real and distinct person. The Incarnation explains why Jesus could suffer and pray and die. It does not explain who he was praying to when he prayed, unless there is someone genuinely there to receive the prayer.
"Early Christians Deified Jesus as Yahweh to Solve a Social Problem"
Bernard's final major argument is sociological. He draws on the work of Daniel Boyarin and Heikki Raisanen to explain why Paul and the early Christians identified Jesus as Yahweh rather than as a second divine being alongside Yahweh. The answer, Bernard argues, has to do with mission. The early Christians were Jewish monotheists who wanted to reach the entire Greco-Roman world. They needed an identity that was both distinctively Jewish (exclusive monotheism, not paganism) and universally accessible (not an ethnic religion tied to circumcision and dietary laws). The solution was to identify Jesus as the one God of Israel made accessible to everyone. Strict monotheism + universal access + Jesus = early Christianity. The deification of Jesus was the key that unlocked both doors at once.
Bernard uses this argument to suggest that the early Christian identification of Jesus with Yahweh was motivated more by social and missiological needs than by a theological account of three persons in one God. It was a rhetorical strategy, not a revelation about the inner nature of God.
This is an interesting historical observation, and it is partly right. The way Paul talks about Jesus does serve the purpose of connecting Jewish monotheism to a universal mission. Romans 3:30, which Bernard quotes, is a good example: "Since God is one, he will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith." The oneness of God is directly linked to the oneness of the salvation plan for all people. That connection is real in Paul.
But explaining why Paul used a certain kind of language does not tell you whether the content of that language is true. Every theological claim is made by someone in a particular social situation and serves some function in that situation. That does not make it merely a social construct. Paul also spoke of his gospel as a "mystery hidden for ages but now revealed" (Col 1:26), not as a strategy developed in response to cultural pressure. He said he received it "through a revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal 1:12), not through sociological analysis. Bernard can show that Paul's theology served social purposes. He cannot show from that observation alone that the theology was invented rather than received.
There is a deeper problem. Bernard's socio-rhetorical framework assumes Paul was consciously managing the social identity of a new religious movement and choosing theological formulations that would advance that project. But the texts in which Paul is most emphatic about the identity of Jesus are not the strategic missionary texts. They appear in letters written to people who already believe, in the middle of arguments about something else entirely, like the resurrection (1 Cor 15), or Jewish and Gentile unity (Gal 3), or the collection for Jerusalem (2 Cor 8). Paul did not deploy Christology as a rhetorical tool. It was the core of everything he said, in every context. That is what you would expect if the identity of Jesus was the thing Paul had actually encountered on the Damascus road and could not get around, not a rhetorical device he had invented.
"The Early Christians Were Not 'Binitarian'"
Bernard takes aim at Larry Hurtado's description of early Christian devotion as "binitarian," a pattern of worship directed at both the Father and the risen Lord Jesus. Hurtado argues this binitarian devotion was unprecedented in Jewish worship and is what made early Christianity distinct from every other form of Second Temple Judaism. Bernard accepts the evidence but rejects the label. If Jewish monotheism was as strict as Hurtado himself argues, then devotion directed at two figures in the Godhead would have violated Jewish monotheism. Since the early Jewish Christians clearly did not think they were violating monotheism, their devotion must have been directed at one figure, not two. That one figure is Jesus, the manifestation of Yahweh. They were not binitarian; they were Oneness.
Bernard's argument here is actually worth engaging on Hurtado's own terms. Hurtado himself wrestled with the question of how a devout Jewish group could begin directing to Jesus the kind of worship that was reserved for God alone without breaking their own rule. His answer is that the inclusion of Jesus in the devotional life of the earliest communities was a mutation, something genuinely new in the history of Jewish monotheism, triggered by the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit.
But Bernard's counter is not actually stronger than Hurtado's position. If you say the early Christians directed their worship exclusively at Jesus as Yahweh, you still have to explain everything that points the other direction. The Lord's Prayer is addressed to "our Father in heaven," not to Jesus. The earliest Christian hymn scholars can identify, Philippians 2:6-11, ends with the confession that "Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Jesus is exalted and the Father receives the glory. Those are not the same person. Paul's constant formula "grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:3; 2 Cor 1:2; Gal 1:3) names them together as a paired source of blessing. If they were the same person, the formula would be redundant to the point of being nonsense.
Hurtado's "binitarian" is not a perfect label, and he would be the first to say so. It is an approximation for something that was genuinely new and hard to categorize. But the reason it is hard to categorize is not that the early Christians were secret Oneness Pentecostals. It is that they were confronting something the categories had never had to handle before: a person who was genuinely human, genuinely crucified, and genuinely raised from the dead, and who was now the proper object of the worship that had always been reserved for Yahweh alone. That is not a problem you solve by identifying Jesus with Yahweh and calling it a day. It is a problem that eventually, over centuries of careful thought, produced the doctrine of the Trinity.
The Real Question This Book Raises
Bernard's doctoral thesis is the most academically careful thing he has written, and it deserves to be read that way. He engages real scholarship, cites real evidence, and raises questions that Trinitarian Christians should take seriously. The early Christians were Jewish monotheists, and the Trinitarian formula as developed in the fourth century does use categories that Paul did not use. Both of those things are true.
But notice what the book cannot quite do. It cannot make Paul's actual sentences cohere with a Oneness reading. The Father sends the Son. The Son prays to the Father. The Spirit intercedes while the Son is at the Father's right hand. The Father is pleased with the Son at his baptism. The Son will hand the kingdom back to the Father at the end. These are not isolated proof texts. They are the texture of Paul's thinking from one end of his letters to the other.
Bernard's conclusion is that Paul "affirmed strict monotheism but deified Jesus" without positing a second divine person. That sounds tidy. But the reason Paul's writings sound like more than one person is that they involve more than one person. According toi Bernard, the God Paul knew was a God who spoke to himself, sent himself, was pleased with himself, raised himself, and will ultimately hand the kingdom back to himself. That is a stranger and lonelier God than the God of the Bible shows us.
Paul met Jesus. He also knew God as Father, and he knew the Spirit as the Spirit of Christ working in believers. He never explained how all three related to each other in the way the Nicene councils eventually did. But the distinctions are his. The Trinitarian tradition did not invent the Father, Son, and Spirit. It tried, imperfectly and through a lot of conflict, to say precisely what Paul already knew.
This article responds to David K. Bernard, The Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ: Deification of Jesus in Early Christian Discourse (Blandford Forum: Deo Publishing, 2016). Key texts: 2 Corinthians 3:16-4:6; Romans 8:9-11, 26-27, 34; Philippians 2:6-11; 1 Corinthians 15:24-28; Galatians 4:4. Counter-sources: Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Gregory A. Boyd, Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992).
Footnotes
- ↑ I try not to use academic terms on this website, as the average reader may struggle with them. However, Bernard uses the term "ontological" repeatedly in his paper, so I need to use it as well. Ontological refers to the branch of philosophy known as ontology, which is the study of being, existence, and the fundamental nature of reality. It asks, "What actually exists?" and "What makes something a 'thing'?"