Last Sunday my pastor asked me to teach Bible study and he wanted me specifically to focus on the shortcomings of Oneness Pentecostal theology. He asked for the arguments from Scripture that would show that Jesus is definitely not both Father and Son. I quickly quipped, “Just read the Gospel of John.” I was serious. So last night we went through the Gospel of John noting the personal distinction between Father and Son. We touched on some OP arguments concerning ideal preexistence in John 1:1 and how they fall short, but even if they succeeded there, they’d fail in John 17:5. We looked at Jesus’ use of plural pronouns in reference to himself and the Father (e.g., John 10:30; 14:23). We discussed the problem of asserting that Father and Son are able to interact with each other because each nature is speaking/acting (the problem being that it attributes personality to each nature effectively making Jesus two persons). So on and so forth for a couple of hours.
I opened it up for questions at the end and inevitably someone asked about Oneness doctrine sending people to hell. First of all, I’m not God, so I don’t decide to who goes to hell and who doesn’t, therefore I can’t know for sure. My belief is that people who willfully and knowingly reject the Trinity and embrace something else have placed their faith in a god that cannot save them. So that’s that. But as I drove home I wondered why it always boils down to that. Why does it always come to asking whether or not something is hell-worthy? Why not embrace good doctrine for the sake of embracing good doctrine? What if it has no eternal benefits but only gives us the pleasure of knowing the truth here and now? Why not eschew heresy for the sake of eschewing heresy? Let’s say that heretics don’t go to hell, what then? Do we want to all of a sudden become heretics because we can get away with it? I’d think not, but then again, some folks are so contrarian that they’d probably do exactly that.
B”H
I don’t know why it always comes down to that, why most people are just worried about not going to hell. I was talking with one of our deacons yesterday and he mentioned a preacher friend of his who always preaches hellfire and damnation because “that’s all there is.” While hell is to be taken seriously, it’s hardly all there is and if we’re only concerned about doing/thinking/saying things to keep ourselves out of hell, then we’re probably not quite walking in the Spirit but as one trying to keep the law.
Such a good point. (Well, two good points. “Why is modalism wrong?” “Read John!”) I get very tired of it. In general sys. th. classes when I talk about baptism, the question always comes up, “Do you have to be baptized to be saved?” I point out that’s the wrong question–in the NT, saved people are baptized. (Sorry, paedobaptists, but no one in the NT is baptized prior to faith.) The real point of the question is, if I don’t get baptized (or X doesn’t get baptized), will I/he/she go to hell? Why do we have to frighten people with hell in order for them to obey?
That, coupled with the recent revelation (to naive me) that when most people ask questions what they really want to hear is not the findings of years of careful study but “Yes, your preconceptions are absolutely right!” can be a little discouraging.
If you get no pleasure knowing it, there is no eternal benefit to knowing it, and it makes no practical difference in your life, is there then any reason why we should care whether a doctrine is true or not?
“My belief is that people who willfully and knowingly reject the Trinity and embrace something else have placed their faith in a god that cannot save them.”
Are you saying that if I don’t believe the Trinity doctrine because it doesn’t make sense to me, I have “willfully” rejected it and am damned?
If God’s grace doesn’t work without all our intellectual conclusions being correct, then we’re all in trouble.
Great thoughts. As the old saying goes, some seek salvation as “fire insurance” ;-) Hell should not be ignored but it should not be the focus. The Ethiopian went on his way rejoicing because he found Jesus, not wiping his brow because he escaped hell.
Jason: Good point. I’ll admit that I initially came to Christ because I realized that I’d go to hell without him but it’s not something I think about much anymore. There’s so many other pressing issues that hell stays in the background.
Sean: That can definitely be discouraging. It makes you wonder why you put in the effort in the first place.
Bryan: I think there are certainly practical benefits and enjoyment that comes from knowing/believing the truth (such as embracing God as Lord over all areas of our life including what we think/believe — this was a point I made last night). There’s eternal benefits as well but I don’t think that’s the only reason we should care. Last night I gave a brief timeline of the rise of Oneness Pentecostalism and at the end of it I made three points:
• Theology (good or bad) has practical consequences.
• Doctrine is born from experience/practice.
• God (theology) and Salvation (soteriology) are always connected.
As we learned, this “new issue” as it was called (i.e., baptism in Jesus’ name only) led to a revised view of God where all three persons were collapsed into one. The practical consequence of this shift was 156 AoG ministers who had embraced the teaching being barred from membership in the AoG in 1916. But the wider-reaching consequence was that many of them took entire congregations with them. So I think it does make a practical difference in life. For those early Pentecostals they lost the benefits of unity and fellowship because they chose to go their own way, but this has been the case with all heretics from the inception of the church.
Paul D.: I wouldn’t say that we’re all in trouble. Just those of us who willfully reject who God is in favor of accepting something that God is not. As for you, I’d need more information, but it sounds as if you’ve made your own rationality your ultimate standard (i.e., you don’t believe it because it doesn’t make sense to you). That’s a problem all on its own.
Matthew: Amen.
Hi Nick,
Personally, as you’d understand and appreciate, I’m considerably more reticent than you about Oneness because I was saved in a OP church – especially as it’s the one heresy that believes in the full deity of Christ, however flawed. My intellectual understanding (and all the concomitants in practice that followed) changed after I became a Trinitarian. Nonetheless, I don’t recall any difference to my heart or attitude to God, rather a better and fuller grasp of the God to whom I’d already entrusted my life.
Maybe, being very cautious about prognosticating on the salvation of others is best, after all, how many ordinary Christians believe they are Trinitarians when in fact we find a spectrum which veres from naive modalism to outright tritheism. Ultimately, and thankfully, its our gracious God who gets to determine eternal matters rather than us; we’re bound to make a complete mess of it all.
As an aside, doubtless my academic focus on Jewish monotheism and the development of NT Christology and, especially, on GJohn stems from my own experience of moving from OP to trinitarianism.
Nick, I understand you see the benefits but if there were no actual eternal benefits (as you conceded being possible) and the practical benefits were negligible (not really making much of a difference) and there was no enjoyment or pleasure from knowing something that was true (that’s obviously subject to the particular person, but that’s the point), then would it be ok to not care about that truth? I think the answer is yes, the disagreement comes over whether there is an actual benefit or not to knowing that truth
Many believe that Jesus harrowed Hell. I find the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar particularly interesting on this point.
Assigning Jews to Hell carries special difficulties — it means asserting that the Covenant (Christians sometimes call it “the Original Covenant”) was canceled (or modified/fulfilled/nullified/whatever). Of course, many Christians believe this, but it requires a rather forced reading of the Hebrew Bible.
I myself believe that Shakespeare had the correct vision when he famously wrote “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” in The Tempest.
I have difficulty in believing in the “Traditional” understanding of hell. I believe there is more Biblical weight for the doctrine of Annihilation then there is for our understanding of Eternal Torment. It seems to my reading of the Scriptures that the wages of sin is death… and once dead always dead….seems to me that this is what God said to Adam and Eve… eat and you will die…
I also believe the Gospel is a positive message with more emphasis on what God has done…with a therefore repent… then what is supported by… REPENT or BURN. The gift of God is forgiveness of sins and eternal life…
Jonathan: I don’t know that OP’s are the only heretics to embrace the full deity of Christ. Mormons are happy to affirm his deity (although he’s just one god among many) and Docetists (at one time at least, don’t know if any are left) affirmed his deity to the exclusion of his humanity. So they all affirm it while denying different things. But as I said, I don’t make the decisions about heaven and hell so I’ll not say who’s going where with any certainty. I will say that I fully believe that idolaters are hell-bound and leave it at that.
Bryan: It’s not really that I conceded the possibility that there are no eternal benefits (or consequences); I more just said, for the sake of argument, ‘so what if there aren’t?’ I do think the here and now practical benefits and consequences are significant though (as they are with any number of things). If I got up and started teaching heresy in my church I’d get kicked out. That’s a pretty big deal, I think. But take something non-theological like drug addiction. I don’t think that drug addicts by virtue of their being drug addicts are necessarily going to hell. But is that reason then to promote drug use? Of course not. Something might not send us to hell but that doesn’t make it good for us. Likewise, not using drugs probably won’t gain us any rewards in heaven but it’s worth it to not use them here and now for any number of reasons. I suppose where we’ll be most at odds is on how “negligible” these things are.
Theophrastus: I’ve not read much Balthasar so I’m not familiar with what he’s said on the issue. I’ve read in various places that he flirted with universalism (I’m not sure if he out and out embraced it) so I can imagine what he’s said.
In terms of Jews, I suppose it depends on which ones we’re talking about, and since I’m a Christian I’d have to take the NT into consideration in evaluating the issue. But I’ll say that Shakespeare was at least half-right: the devils are here.
Craig: I don’t have any issues with the traditional understanding of hell but I suppose that’s a topic best left for another post.
“It’s not really that I conceded the possibility that there are no eternal benefits (or consequences); I more just said, for the sake of argument, ‘so what if there aren’t?’”
Exactly. I should have written for the sake of argument. But that’s what I was getting at. You assumed that for the sake of argument and then appealed to truth for the sake of truth and whether the “pleasure of knowing the truth” was still enough. I’m asking what if that particular truth gives you no pleasure at all knowing it? Then should you no bother or care about it then?
“If I got up and started teaching heresy in my church I’d get kicked out. That’s a pretty big deal, I think.”
Yes but what if you didn’t have anything happen? What if nothing happened to the person in your church who believed heresy? It’s not hard to imagine that that could be the case.
Given those 3 things (1. no eternal consequences, 2. no pleasure or pain from knowing, and 3. no practical consequences) for the sake of argument, would you say you shouldn’t care about or bother with that doctrine or whatever truth may be under consideration?
Sorry if this is repetitive, I’ve just been wondering what you believe on this for a while and I think it gets at the heart of the title of your post: truth for the sake of truth.
The question to ask is what is really heretical?
Bryan: I see what you’re saying. I wasn’t really saying, “gives us the pleasure” as in “makes us happy” — I was using it more colloquially (I think), just like a figure of speech (e.g., I say “pleasure to meet you” to some folks that I don’t care the least about meeting — it’s just something to say — sorry to anyone I’ve said that to!). But that aside, even if knowing truth brings us no pleasure I think we should care about it for truth’s sake. For instance (and I don’t intend to get into the merits of the traditional view of hell here, let’s just say that it’s not a desirable place to go whatever it’s like), I take no pleasure in knowing the truth about hell, i.e., I’m not happy to know that it exists or that anyone is going, but it’s still worth knowing about and caring about precisely because I’d prefer for people to not go and if something else I know the truth about (namely Jesus) can keep them from it then it’s worth telling them. See what I mean?
As far as the person in the church who believes heresy and has no visible consequences I’d defer to the unseen consequences (in the here and now for the sake of this discussion). Everyone doesn’t see every though I have, but God does, and some of them aren’t pleasing in the least to him. If Jesus is Lord then he should be Lord over everything I think and when I don’t submit to his Lordship in my thought life then that’s a problem and it’s worth caring about even if no one other than me and God know about it. Make sense?
Now, if there were no consequences or benefits of any sort, for the sake of argument, then sure, I’d concede that whatever the truth in question is wouldn’t be worth caring about. If believing or not believing said truth didn’t honor or dishonor God then who cares? But the question I’d ask would be whether or not that’s possible. I mean can there really be some neutral ground? Maybe I should have titled the post, “Truth for the Sake of Truth to the Glory of God” or something like that since I presuppose God’s lordship over everything. So when I made the point last night about that it was basically that if God is Lord over even our thoughts then shouldn’t we believe what he’s revealed in his Word? Doesn’t it matter what we believe? It was on the drive home that I started to think that it matters even if there are no eternal ramifications to it. And on that notes, I’ve gone way longer than I intended. Thanks, as always, for pressing me on this.
Craig: Oh, that’s easy to answer since the Church has already defined that. Thank God for them councils! :-)
Hans Urs von Balthasar is considerably more deep and insightful than just “flirting with universalism” — you gotta be pretty good to be named one of the top theologians of the last century.
Thanks Nick. I understand what you were getting at. I might write more on my blog later to kind of flesh out where I was going with this since it kind of jumps off from your post.
Theophrastus: No doubt. I’ll have to wait to see just how good he is though.
Bryan: Cool. I look forward to it.