Bernard's The Oneness of God - Chapter 12
Bernard presents 26 supposed "contradictions" in Trinitarianism, argues the doctrine is nonbiblical in both terminology and content, provides a comparison table of Trinitarianism vs. Oneness, and asks what the average church member "really believes."
1. THE 26 "CONTRADICTIONS" — OVERALL ASSESSMENT
Bernard's list is rhetorically effective but is predominantly composed of either (a) questions the Trinitarian tradition has answered in detail using Chalcedonian Christology, or (b) genuine puzzles that Trinitarians acknowledge as mysteries without claiming them to be logical contradictions. A systematic Trinitarian can answer every item. Bernard presents them without engaging standard Trinitarian responses — a sustained straw man argument.
Selected items with responses:
Items 3-6 (Prayer, knowledge, power subordination): The Trinitarian answer is Chalcedonian two-nature Christology: the Son's limitations in knowledge (Mark 13:32), power (John 5:19), and prayer (Matthew 26:39) belong to his human nature, not his divine person. The divine person of the Son, united with human nature, voluntarily submitted to genuine human limitation in the Incarnation. This is not a contradiction — it is the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum (properties of the natures communicated to the one person). Bernard acknowledges this answer exists but dismisses it with "Are there two Sons?" (item 12) — which is precisely what the Trinitarian denies: there is one divine person of the Son with two natures, not two Sons.
Item 1 (Two fathers): Bernard asks whether Jesus had two fathers (the Father and the Holy Spirit as conceiving agent). The Trinitarian answer: the Father is Jesus' eternal Father in the immanent Trinity (the relation of eternal generation); the Holy Spirit is the agent of the virginal conception in the Incarnation. The conception does not constitute another "father" in the same sense — the Spirit acted as God's power overshadowing Mary, not as a second parental origin. The Father and Spirit are not two competing fathers but one God whose first person is Father and whose third person acted instrumentally in the Incarnation.
Item 7 (Can God die?): Bernard asks: "Can God die? Can part of God die?" The Trinitarian answer: the divine person of the Son died in his human nature. Divinity as the divine essence did not cease to exist — the person of the Son, in the Incarnation, became capable of death through his human nature. The communicatio idiomatum means the death is properly attributed to the divine person (which is why it is saving — "the Lord of glory was crucified," 1 Corinthians 2:8) without the divine nature itself undergoing ontological cessation. Bernard's question imports a category that orthodox Trinitarianism does not accept — that the divine essence or nature died.
Item 11 (The Son's reign ends in 1 Corinthians 15:28): This is Bernard's most substantive point and deserves acknowledgment as a genuine exegetical puzzle. The Trinitarian response distinguishes the mediatorial kingdom (the Son's redemptive role as the God-man, which is temporal and economy-bound) from the eternal person of the Son (who remains the Son forever in the immanent Trinity). 1 Corinthians 15:28 describes the completion of the economy of redemption — after which the Son's function as mediator is completed and God is "all in all." This does not mean the eternal person of the Son ceases to exist or ceases to be the Son; it means the temporary soteriological order is superseded by the eternal state.
Item 21 (Blasphemy of the Spirit vs. Son): The Trinitarian answer: blasphemy against the Son in his earthly humiliation can be forgiven because the Son was veiled in human flesh, and ignorance of his identity is possible (Acts 3:17: "I know that you acted in ignorance"). Blasphemy against the Spirit is unforgivable because it involves a deliberate, final rejection of the Spirit's convicting and witnessing testimony — the very mechanism of repentance and faith. To reject the Spirit's witness is to foreclose the only path to forgiveness.
2. THE "MYSTERY" CRITIQUE — BERNARD'S IRONIC SELF-REFUTATION
Bernard argues that Trinitarianism's appeal to "mystery" is an evasion and that God "never contradicts true logic." He insists God's oneness is "no mystery." The irony: Bernard's own system is equally full of profound mystery. How can the omnipresent Spirit of Jesus speak from heaven while simultaneously inhabiting a physical body in the Jordan River without those being two locations of one indivisible Spirit? How can Jesus be "forsaken" by the Father-Spirit while the same Father-Spirit never departed his body until death? How can the Son have genuinely prayed "not my will, but yours" if the Son is the Father — whose will was he submitting to other than his own? Bernard's system involves mysteries at every turn — it simply claims not to, which makes it epistemically overconfident rather than genuinely clearer. The Trinitarian does not say the Trinity is irrational or self-contradictory — that would require demonstrating that "one God in three persons" contains a logical contradiction of the form P and not-P simultaneously. The claim is that it is transrational — exceeding the categories of finite human experience without violating the law of non-contradiction. As Grudem notes, the Trinity is defined precisely to avoid formal contradiction: not "one person who is three persons" but "one being who subsists in three persons." 3. THE "AVERAGE CHURCH MEMBER" APPEAL — A POPULIST FALLACY
Bernard argues that most ordinary Christians "instinctively think in Oneness terms" — praying to Jesus, expecting to see one God in heaven, rarely praying to the Spirit as a distinct person. This is an appeal to popular intuition that proves nothing theologically. Sophisticated doctrine is not determined by how naturally it comes to the theologically untrained. Furthermore, the behaviors Bernard cites are entirely consistent with standard Trinitarian devotional practice: directing prayer "to Jesus" is consistent with Christ's role as mediator (1 Timothy 2:5) and with his divine person; expecting to see "one God" (Jesus) in heaven is consistent with Colossians 1:15's identification of Christ as "the image of the invisible God" — the visible presence of the one God for human perception; seldom praying directly to the Spirit is explained by John 16:13's self-effacing role of the Spirit. 4. THE COMPARISON TABLE — TERMINOLOGICAL ASYMMETRY
The Trinitarianism vs. Oneness table (pages 167-169) is deliberately asymmetric. Bernard's Trinitarian column consistently describes the doctrine in its most vulnerable or least carefully qualified form. For example, item 8: "We will see the Trinity or the Triune God in heaven. (Many trinitarians say we will see three bodies, which is outright tritheism. Others leave open the possibility that we will see only one Spirit being with one body. Most trinitarians do not know what they believe about this.)" The parenthetical characterization of Trinitarians as predominantly confused or tritheistic while Oneness believers clearly "will see Jesus Christ in heaven" is rhetorically powerful but uncharitable misrepresentation. Standard Trinitarian theology (e.g., Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 262) is unambiguous: in heaven we will see the glorified body of Jesus Christ — the human nature of the eternal Son — as the visible locus of divine presence. This is not confusion; it is the standard Trinitarian teaching on the beatific vision and the glorified Christ as the image of the invisible God.
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