Counterfeiting the Mormon Concept of God
Review of God. In The Counterfeit Gospel of Mormonism by Francis J. Beckwith
Reviewed By: Richard R. Hopkins
Provo, Utah: FARMS, 2000. Pp. 21574
(Excerpt) Beckwith admits that "'Trinity' is merely the term employed by theologians and church historians in order to describe the phenomenon of God they find in the Bible" (p. 60). Thus he admits that the Trinity is not biblical in itself but is merely one attempt to understand what is taught in the Bible about God.
Beckwith then proves two basic truths that every Christian knows, namely, that the Bible teaches "there is only one God," and "there are three distinct Persons called God" (p. 62). What he does not prove is that the Bible applies the term person to the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost in any way similar to the way in which classical theists use that term. Thus the problem doesn't lie with Beck-with's proof of his premises. Nor does it lie with his conclusion that "the three Persons . . . are the one God" (p. 62). Mormonism fully acknowledges the biblical source of these teachings.
His problem lies with the assumption that the oneness of the three Persons is ontological in nature. Classical theologians from the late second century have insisted that these teachings imply something about God that has to do with his substance or being. But that was only true of the Supreme Being of Greek philosophy. He and his Logos were considered to be the same Being. That may have been true of Plato's god, but it was never true of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
What, then, is the Bible's explanation of the oneness of God? One explanation is found in John 17:20-23 where Christ explains:
"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me."
This expresses a form of composite unity not foreign to either the understanding or experience of Christ's audience. It is the only biblical explanation of God's oneness, and it is the one Mormonism accepts. The ontological unity of the three Persons promulgated by classical theists is nowhere similarly attested in the Bible. (End Excerpt)
It is also a note that the word trinity was not created by God or inferred by his prophets or apostles. This was a term imposed by theologians after the fall of the early Christian Church.
No extant copies/translations of the Bible appear to contain the word 'Trinity'.
"In Scripture there is as yet no single term by which the Three Divine Persons are denoted together. The word τρίας [triŽas] (of which the Latin trinitas is a translation) is first found in Theophilus of Antioch about A. D. 180. . . . Shortly afterwards it appears in its Latin form of trinitas in Tertullian." ~The Catholic Encyclopedia.
Therefore the term trinity and it's doctrine is not a Bibicial doctrine, but a theological doctrine made by men after the fall of the early Christian Church and absence of the apostles. These apostles of God's true Church were the only one's in the history of the Bible who had the power and authority to receive revelation from God. All other doctrines created after the apostles were gone were NOT from God but derived by men without the power and authority to obtain revelation from God. Thus the trinity doctrine is a "NON-REVELATION" and merely man's attempt to deal with the scriptures contained in the scriptural texts that speak of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, each as a person and each as a God.
