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This is our series of articles analyzing David Bernard's book, The Oneness of God. You are on the page that is in bold. Click on the links to go to a particular chapter:

A Critical Analysis of Chapter 7 of The Oneness of God by David K. Bernard

"Old Testament Explanations"

"And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil" (Genesis 3:22).

Chapter 7 is different from what came before it. Rather than making a positive case for Oneness theology, Bernard is here doing damage control — working through Old Testament passages that, on a straightforward reading, suggest plurality within the being of God. His task is to explain them away. The chapter covers Elohim, the plural pronouns ("let us make man"), the Hebrew word echad, the angel of the Lord, the wisdom of God in Proverbs 8, Daniel 7, and several other texts that Trinitarians point to as hints of the Trinity in the OT.

Bernard works hard throughout, and some of his explanations are reasonable on their own terms. But the chapter's strategy has a structural weakness it never overcomes: when any one explanation for a difficult text would do, offering five possible explanations signals that none of them is strong. And when you track the most important arguments — Genesis 1:26, Daniel 7, and Isaiah 48:16 — the problems go deeper than Bernard acknowledges.

What Bernard Gets Right

Bernard's handling of Elohim is mostly sound. He's right that the plural form of the word for God doesn't prove the Trinity on its own. Hebrew uses Elohim for the one golden calf (Exodus 32), for individual pagan gods, and for the one God of Israel — always with singular verbs when the true God is meant. No serious Trinitarian scholar builds the Trinity primarily on Elohim. Bernard is scoring points against a weak argument, not the doctrine itself.

He's also right that the plural "holy, holy, holy" in Isaiah 6:3 is just Hebrew repetition for emphasis, not evidence of three persons. Double and triple repetitions for emphasis are all over the OT (see Jeremiah 22:29: "O earth, earth, earth"). This is a common trinitarian overreach that Bernard rightly calls out.

And he's right that the Angel of the Lord passages don't require two persons of God. Whether the Angel is a genuine manifestation of God himself or simply a representative acting in God's name, neither reading requires a multiplicity of divine beings. The Jews themselves have always held this.

The problem is that after cleaning up these secondary arguments, Bernard turns to the primary ones — and his explanations there don't hold.

Genesis 1:26 — Too Many Answers, None of Them Convincing

"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Bernard offers not one explanation for this verse but five: (1) God was speaking to the angels, (2) God was counseling his own will, (3) it's a majestic plural, (4) the plural pronoun agrees with the plural noun Elohim, or (5) it's a prophetic address to the future Son.

When a Bible passage requires five possible explanations, that itself is telling. A strong reading doesn't need a list of fallback positions. Each of Bernard's options has its own problem.

The angel explanation fails immediately when you move to verse 27: "So God created man in his own image." If God was consulting angels, the image used in creation should be God's-and-the-angels', but the very next verse shifts to the singular. Genesis 1:27 makes clear that whoever "us" is in verse 26, the image of God alone — not angels — is what humans were made in. The angels can't be the referent.

The majestic plural has no actual evidence in biblical Hebrew. Grudem's Systematic Theology notes this directly: there are no other examples in OT Hebrew of a single speaker referring to himself with plural verbs in a "royal we" style. The Daniel and Artaxerxes examples Bernard cites involve human kings who actually were part of groups — royal courts and councils. They are not lone individuals using plural self-reference. Applying this practice to the one God here is an assumption with no Hebrew parallel to support it.

The "prophetic reference to the future Son" is speculation dressed as exegesis. Nothing in Genesis 1 signals that God is speaking across time to a not-yet-existing human incarnation. And Bernard himself argued in Chapter 5 that the Son didn't actually exist before the Incarnation — so who exactly is God talking to here?

The most natural explanation remains the one the early church consistently accepted: God speaks in the plural in Genesis 1:26 because within his own being there is real internal relationship — a "someone" to speak to. Boyd documents this in Oneness Pentecostals and the Trinity: the Epistle of Barnabas, written sometime between AD 70 and 132 — within a generation or two of the apostles — already treats Genesis 1:26 as God speaking to the preexistent Christ. Justin Martyr, Theophilus, and others from the same period do the same. This wasn't a later corruption of the faith. It was the reading of the earliest Christians who had direct connection to the apostolic community.

The same problem applies to Genesis 3:22 ("Behold, the man has become like one of us") and Genesis 11:7 ("Let us go down and confuse their language"). Bernard waves these off as God speaking to angels. But look at Genesis 11:7 carefully: "Come, let us go down." God is describing a decision and action he will take — not delegating to a council. And Isaiah 6:8 is the clearest case of all: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" The same verse uses the singular "I" and the plural "us" in a single breath, from the same speaker. How is God both "I" and "us" at the same moment? Bernard's angel theory can't explain this without saying God invited the angels to co-send the prophet Isaiah — which would be very strange.

The Echad Argument — Overstated on Both Sides

Bernard argues that the Hebrew word echad (one) in the Shema ("The LORD our God, the LORD is one") means absolute numerical oneness, not "oneness in unity." He lists examples where echad clearly means one individual thing — one Canaanite king, one prophet, one angel — and concludes that God's oneness is the same kind of absolute, undivided singularity.

Boyd, to his credit, concedes that Trinitarians sometimes overplay this card in the other direction by arguing that echad always means "unified plurality." The truth is that echad is a flexible word that can mean either, depending on context. Genesis 2:24 uses it for "one flesh" in marriage (clearly two people unified), and Numbers 13:23 uses it for one cluster of grapes (many grapes unified). So it does describe composite unity in some places. But Bernard is right that we can't build the Trinity on echad alone, and Trinitarians shouldn't try to.

What Bernard doesn't mention is the Hebrew word yachid — which does specifically mean "sole, alone, the only one" with no ambiguity about unity versus numerical singularity. Yachid is used for Isaac as Abraham's "only son" in Genesis 22. It's used for an "only child" in Jeremiah 6:26. If God had wanted the Shema to say "I am absolutely one solitary individual with no internal distinctions whatsoever," yachid would have made that much clearer. But the Shema uses echad, not yachid. The choice of the more flexible word at least leaves open the possibility of the kind of unity-within-distinction the Trinity describes.

Proverbs 8 — The Dismissal Is Too Easy

Bernard disposes of the Wisdom passages in Proverbs 8 in a few sentences: wisdom is just a literary personification, he says, and since wisdom is personified as a woman, the second person of the Godhead would have to be female — which is absurd. Point made, chapter closed.

But this moves too fast. Grudem himself says Proverbs 8:22 is probably best read as personified wisdom rather than a direct description of the Son. So far, so good for Bernard. But the relevance of Proverbs 8 isn't that wisdom is literally the Son of God — it's that the picture drawn in verses 22–31 (wisdom was "beside God" as a "master workman" at creation, rejoicing in God's presence before the world was made) anticipates the language of John 1:1-3 and Colossians 1:15-17 with striking precision. The NT authors themselves draw on this background when describing Christ as "the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:24) and as the one in whom all wisdom dwells (Colossians 2:3).

What Proverbs 8 gives us isn't a proof text for the Trinity. It's evidence that the OT itself was already developing language about something within God — a personal, creative, relational presence alongside God before creation — that the NT then identifies with the Son. Bernard's "it's just a figure of speech" dismissal doesn't engage with this trajectory at all. And his "the second person would be female" argument is irrelevant: Hebrew grammatical gender doesn't determine the gender of a divine person any more than the fact that ruach (spirit) is feminine in Hebrew makes the Holy Spirit female.

Isaiah 48:16 — The "Man and His Spirit" Analogy Fails

Bernard interprets Isaiah 48:16 — "And now the Lord God has sent me, and his Spirit" — by comparing it to "a man and his spirit." Just as a person and his spirit aren't two different persons, he argues, God and his Spirit aren't two different persons. The phrase simply describes God in his transcendent totality ("Lord God") and God in his active presence among people ("his Spirit").

Grudem points directly to why this analogy breaks down. In Isaiah 48:16, two things are said to have been sent: the speaker (identified by most scholars as the Servant of the Lord, pointing forward to Christ) and the Spirit. Sending is a relational act. When something is sent, there is a sender and a sent one — two distinct realities. The verse presents both the Lord God and his Spirit as co-senders of the Servant. A man and his spirit don't send things independently of each other. You can send a representative; you don't send your spirit alongside your representative as a co-agent.

Grudem notes that from a full New Testament perspective, Isaiah 48:16 has a Trinitarian shape: the Lord God (Father) and his Spirit both send the Servant (the Son). Whether or not you accept that reading, the verse is doing more than Bernard's "man and his spirit" analogy can absorb.

Daniel 7 — A Circular Argument

Daniel 7 presents Bernard with a genuine difficulty. The prophet sees the Ancient of Days on a heavenly throne, and then "one like the Son of Man" coming to receive dominion and glory. If the Ancient of Days is the Father and the Son of Man is Christ, this looks like two distinct divine persons — which is exactly what Jesus seems to say at his trial when he quotes this passage and applies it to himself (Mark 14:62).

Bernard's solution is to argue that the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7 is actually Jesus himself, based on parallels with Revelation 1 (white hair, fiery appearance). If the Ancient of Days is Jesus and the Son of Man is also Jesus, then the whole vision just shows Jesus in two modes — his divine role and his human role.

But this is circular. It only works if you already assume Jesus and the Father are the same person. Carry no such assumption into Daniel 7, and the most natural reading is two figures: one enthroned from eternity (the Father), the other approaching from a different place to receive authority (the Son). The Revelation 1 parallels Bernard cites show that the glorified Christ shares divine attributes with the one who sat on the throne in Daniel — which is exactly what the Trinity says. Christ is fully God. That doesn't make him the Father.

More importantly, Jesus uses Daniel 7:13 to refer to himself as "the Son of Man" who will be "coming on the clouds of heaven" — and he says this before the Sanhedrin as a claim to divine authority that results in the charge of blasphemy (Mark 14:62–64). On Bernard's reading, Jesus would have been saying: "You will see me — in my divine nature — coming to myself — in my human nature — as the Ancient of Days receives the Son of Man." That is neither what the text says nor what Jesus' audience understood him to claim.

The Five-Explanation Problem — A Pattern Worth Noticing

Step back and look at what Chapter 7 actually does as a whole. For Genesis 1:26, Bernard offers five possible explanations. For the Angel of the Lord, he offers two. For the Daniel 7 figures, he offers multiple readings. For Zechariah, multiple readings again.

The pattern matters. When every difficult text gets a range of possible explanations — each plausible enough in isolation, none of them clearly correct — the overall effect is not to resolve the tension. It's to neutralize it. Bernard is saying: "You can't prove the Trinity from the OT because there's always another way to read these passages." That may be true as far as it goes. But the same standard applies to Oneness theology. The plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26 and Isaiah 6:8 can't prove the Trinity by themselves. But they also can't be conclusively explained away by Bernard's alternatives. They remain unexplained — and unexplained on Oneness grounds as much as on Trinitarian ones.

What the Trinitarian actually claims is not that any single OT passage proves three persons in God, but that a consistent pattern of language across the OT — plural pronouns from God, the Word and Wisdom of God acting alongside God, the Spirit of God as a distinct presence, two figures in Daniel's vision, three co-senders in Isaiah 48 — all fits naturally with the Trinity. Bernard has to work against the grain of all of it. The Trinitarian goes with it.

A Word to the Reader

If you've been taught that the Trinity is foreign to the Old Testament — a new idea invented by Greek-influenced Christians long after the apostles — Chapter 7 may seem like the case for that is settled. Bernard explains every difficult passage. The plurals are majesty or poetry or angels or prophetic anticipation. Nothing requires more than one person of God.

But pay attention to the early church. Boyd documents that by the time the Epistle of Barnabas was written — within a generation of the apostles, long before any supposed Greek corruption entered the church — Genesis 1:26 was already being read as God speaking to the preexistent Christ. The reading Bernard dismisses as a Trinitarian imposition on a Jewish text was actually the reading of the first Christians, who were themselves Jewish believers wrestling with what they had seen in Jesus.

The Old Testament doesn't prove the Trinity in isolation. It was never meant to. The full revelation comes in Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit. But the OT hints are real, they are consistent, and they point in one direction. The question isn't whether you can explain them differently. The question is whether your explanation fits the whole picture better — and Bernard's doesn't.

Footnotes

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