#Walk Away: Why I Am Not a Trinitarian

A faith journey: I believe in God the Father, and in Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. 

I was born and raised in a suburb of Minneapolis, MN at a time when kids played outside all day in the summer and house doors were not locked at night. I am the second of four boys. We were a somewhat typical American suburban family. Dad went to work, kids tolerated school, and mom stayed home until kids got older. Jumping ahead for just a moment, for most of our adult lives we were not typical as the four brothers lived in more or less four different continents. My older brother a pilot in the USA, me a teacher in Israel, next brother a teacher in Japan, and the youngest brother a doctor in Switzerland.

To hear this article on the One God Report podcast, click here.

 

My dad was agnostic about religious things and although not being opposed to others involvement in church, he was not a church-goer. My mom was more involved in church and made the effort to bring her four boys. In our teen years she would pay us $5.00 to come to church (which the internet tells me is equivalent to $30.00 in 2023). When I was 14 years old, she started going to a church that taught the idea of having a “personal relationship with” and “accepting” Jesus. I remember sitting in the church, listening to a message, being bothered by my own sin, and seeing in my mind the man Jesus on the cross, accepting that somehow that man on the cross was a remedy for my sin.

 

Although I could do well in school, I never liked it. Much of school seemed impractical.  Through my high school days, I didn’t live what could be called a “Christ honoring life”, but I always felt I knew there was something about God, Jesus and the Bible that was true. Not long after graduating from high school, I remember sitting on a park bench, looking up at the night sky and praying, “Please God, if you are, I want to know you.”  I started to read the Bible on my own.

 

After working for a year in a grain elevator and then studying at the University of Minnesota for a year, I became interested in the creation-evolution issue and learned there was a Christian college in San Diego, CA that was affiliated with the Institute for Creation Research. I packed up my Chevy Vega station wagon and headed west to study at that college. I was becoming more and more interested in the Bible, and during personal Bible readings from a hill overlooking El Cajon, CA, I consistently prayed, “God, I want to know the truth. I want to know you”.  I think God honors that prayer.

 

I ended up graduating from college with a degree in Bible and Education. I don’t think I would have ever finished college if I couldn’t have studied Bible. I stumbled into the education part through athletic coaching. Back in Minnesota my youngest brother’s jr. high-age basketball team needed a coach, so my other brother and I took it on. I enjoyed it and then coached boys’ community football and baseball teams.

 

The first time I got interested in Israel was when I was browsing the bookstore at the University of Minnesota and saw a picture of “the pool which is in Gibeon” (Jer. 41:12, 2 Sam. 2:13) in the Oxford Bible Atlas. It struck me that “Wow, these places in the Bible are real. I’d like to go there someday”.  Reading about Jerusalem and Galilee in the Gospels, Psalms and Isaiah in college got me more interested in the places mentioned in the Bible to the point where after graduating from college, I decided I wanted to go to Israel to live. I figured it’s a real place. People must be able to find a job there. This was in 1984. I was young and single. I bought a one-way ticket.

In Jerusalem I started learning modern Hebrew, did odd tutoring jobs, and whatever else I could to live inexpensively. For instance, for a while I had a room in the home of an elderly widow whose family wanted someone who would just be home by 9:00 PM in case their elderly mother needed help.

 

Eventually I got a degree in Hebrew language from Jerusalem University College, a school which also focused on biblical history and geography. I started working at the same school, both in administration and teaching. I worked there for eight years.

While working at the school I had become friends with teachers from an American conservative Christian college who were interested in sending larger groups of students to Israel. I helped start an extension campus in Israel in which college and seminary students could study the Bible in the land of the Bible for a semester. For seminary students who were usually a bit older and couldn’t commit to a whole semester, we had intensive three-week Bible geography courses in the summer.

 

By this time, I had met my wife, who had come to Israel to study. We came back briefly to be married in her Indiana hometown and then returned to Israel. 

 

We worked at the college extension campus in Israel for 24 years. It was a great experience. I felt at home in biblical lands, teaching biblical history, geography and Hebrew. I eventually wrote a book called the Satellite Bible Atlas. We lived in a small village just outside Jerusalem which was not only a great place for the students but for raising our five children. Our children are culturally Israeli-American. Two of our boys served in the Israeli military.

 

The small village outside of Jerusalem where we lived is made up of both Jewish and Gentile “believers” or “Messianics”, “Christians”, who claim that Jesus (Yeshua) is the Messiah. I helped start a congregation at the village and was a teaching elder in the congregation for 18 years.

 

As I lived in Israel for decades, I inevitably began to see that there are problems with some claims of mainstream Christianity; indeed, that some mainstream Christian claims were non-biblical. For instance - it took me years - but eventually I began to understand that the biblical promise and hope for humankind is not a disembodied escape to heaven, but of real physical resurrection life to the renewed earth in which righteousness dwells (1 Cor. 6:14, 2 Pet. 3:13).  I didn’t immediately put two and two together, but now understand that the hope of resurrection means that man is not innately immortal. God wasn’t kidding when he said, “You will certainly die” and Paul agreed when he wrote that “the wages of sin is death”. God didn’t say “Your body will die but you, your real “self”, your soul will keep living”.  God  said, “YOU will certainly die”. Mainstream Christianity had adopted Platonic Greek philosophy which claims that death is merely a separation of the body from the soul. 

In some ways, I was beginning to understand more and more the Jewish-ness of the New Testament. And then, a Galilean Israelite in whom there was no guile, Nathanael, caused no small change in my and my family’s life. As recorded in John 1:49, on the first day Nathanael saw Jesus, Nathanael exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel!”

I had been living in Israel long enough and knew enough biblical and Israelite history to know that no righteous Israelite of the 1^st century would say to a human being, “Rabbi you are ‘God the Son’”.

 

Nathanael’s declaration sent me back into the Bible to find out what “Son of God” meant as defined and understood in the Bible itself. I discovered that Christianity had warped the title “Son of God” into “God the Son”. I discovered that “God the Son” is never in the Bible. “God the Son” is not a biblical title or concept but the title “Son of God” in the Bible is always given to created beings, especially to human beings (Rom. 8:19, Gal. 3:26), especially to Israel (Exo. 4:22), and especially as Israel’s representative, to the King of Israel (2 Sam. 7:12-14, Psa. 2:2-7, Psa. 89:26-27).

 

So that’s what Nathanael meant! “Son of God”, though with different emphasis and nuances, is another title for the ideal King of Israel, the Messiah. In its Hebraic, biblical meaning, there is no proclamation of deity whatsoever in the title “Son of God”.

 

I gave a sermon in our congregation to explain the biblical background to the title “Son of God”. I thought it important that Jewish “messianics” in Israel know that the Hebrew Scriptures declare that the Messiah is “the Son of God, not “God the Son”. I challenged people to find the title or idea of “God the Son” in the Bible. Mostly the sermon went over well in the congregation. Only a couple people were puzzled or questioned what I was saying.

So, if Jesus wasn’t “God the Son”, who was he? I had been taught, believed, and even on occasion taught others that Jesus was God and man, that Jesus had a divine nature and a human nature. Even after discovering that Jesus was not “God the Son”, I had heard some teaching and even accepted for a while that, don’t laugh, “Son of Man” was the title that declared Jesus’s deity – because of a vision that the prophet Daniel had seen of a Son of Man in heaven with God, the Ancient of Days.

 

But as I went back to the Scriptures, I discovered more and more that Jesus’ own declaration, and the declaration of the apostles, was not that Jesus was literally God, or a God-man, but that he was a man, a real human person, through whom God worked. The human person Jesus represented God, as he said, “I was sent by God...when you see me you see the Father”. But the God the man Jesus represented was the Father. He was not “God the Son” who became a man.  The New Testament declaration was not “God is Christ” but “God (that is, the Father) in Christ”.

 

My presuppositions about Jesus being “God” or a “God-man” had caused me to skip over so many passages where Jesus is explicitly declared to be a human person. Or, I just thought, “well, that’s the human Jesus”. I didn’t realize that making Jesus into a “dual-natured” person was really making Jesus into a two-faced liar. In truth, I was not really paying attention to what the Scriptures were saying.  All of a sudden Scriptures like these began to jump out at me:

 

John 8:40: “…but now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I heard from God…”

 

John 20:17: “…go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

 

Acts 2:22: “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know…”

 

Acts 2:36: “Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

 

Acts 17:31: “… because he (God) has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."

 

Romans 5:15: “But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.”

 

1 Corinthians 15:21: “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.”

 

Eph. 1:3 (2 Cor. 1:3, 1 Pet. 1:3): Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

 

1 Timothy 2:4-5: God “…desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus…”

 

These Scriptures did not declare that “Jesus is God” or that Jesus was a “God-man”. Quite the contrary. In the Scriptures Jesus is always differentiated from God and is a man. Jesus has a God. I had never seen that before! Indeed, Jesus is a man who is appointed by God, through whom God worked, who was raised from the dead by God and given authority and power at God’s right hand. But nonetheless, a man. The only mediator between God and man is a man, not a God or a God-man (1 Tim. 2:4-5).

 

I had never understood that if you are the Son of the Living God (Matt. 16:16), you obviously are not the Living God.  If you are the Son of God Most High, you are not God Most High (Luke 1:32). My presuppositions were preventing me, blinding me from seeing what the Scriptures really declared. I was following tradition rather than the word of God.

 

Sure, I knew about the proof texts that supposedly declared the “deity of Christ”: John 1:1 “and the Word was God”; John 8:48 “before Abraham comes to be, I am”; John 10:30 “I and the Father are one”; John 20:28 Thomas’ declaration “my Lord and my God”; Philippians 2:5-7, Colossians 1:15-18, etc. So, I went back and studied those passages and came to see that none of these passages declare the “deity of Christ.” In fact, the “deity of Christ” interpretation in each case attempts to denigrate the only God, the Father, and to eliminate the man, the human person, Christ Jesus. For those interested in my findings about supposed “deity of Christ” and Trinitarian proof texts, I invite you to browse the titles and texts on my podcast, the One God Report (any podcast platform or on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@billschlegel1),  or the articles in my blog Land and Bible https://landandbible.blogspot.com/.

When I came across John 17:1-3 where Jesus prays, “Father…this is eternal life, to know you, the ONLY TRUE GOD, and Jesus the Messiah whom you have sent”, and then 1 Corinthians 8:6, “as for us there is one God, the FATHER…”, I wondered, “How come I had never seen this before?” The only answer is that the presuppositions and traditions I had been taught had for years been a veil over my eyes. But now it was clear as day: The only true God is the Father; the one God is the Father.

 

I knew my clearer understanding of who God and Jesus are conflicted with the doctrinal statements of the Trinitarian university where I worked. As I thought about these matters the months past, and I respected the doctrinal statement and didn’t teach anything contrary to the doctrinal statement. Students knew nothing about my developing beliefs. I also could avoid the topics since the focus of my teaching was on biblical, history geography and Hebrew; and, after all, Trinitarianism insists on belief in the humanity of Jesus.

 

In the middle of March 2018, I informed the administration at the Trinitarian university that I would not be able to continue teaching at the school beyond the current semester, which was to finish in about six weeks. Many of the folks at the university, some whom I had known for 20 or 30 years, were understandably shaken at my new, clearer understanding of the Scriptures. I suppose I was a bit naïve in expecting former friends to at least accept the fact that I believed in the God of the Bible, and in Jesus of Nazareth the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God. The Scriptures, touted by Protestants as the only rule for faith and practice had shown me who God and Christ are. Here I was confessing that Jesus is the Christ, but all my former Trinitarian colleagues claimed I was denying Christ!

 

Trinitarianism is threatened by people who believe that the man, the human person, the human being, Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, and not one member of a co-equal, co-eternal group of persons who supposedly together are one divine being. I’ve found that many Christians seem to think “Christ” is a title for deity. It most definitely is not. Protestant Christianity in particular, which insists that the Bible is the sole authority for belief and practice, has a big problem since nowhere in the Bible is God presented as a triune being. And, nowhere in the Bible is belief in the Trinity or “deity of Christ” described as necessary for salvation. On the contrary, Israelites and Gentiles who heard the gospel proclaimed by the apostles in the Book of Acts never heard declarations about the Trinity or the “deity of Christ” - but were being “saved” by the thousands!

 

I felt a bit like the blind man (John 9) who came to see and believe that Jesus is the Messiah (“the Son of Man”) but the religious leaders told him to “get out of here!”  My experience is not unique. As more and more people come to saving knowledge that the Father is the one true God and Jesus is the Messiah who was killed but whom God raised from the dead and exalted to God’s own right hand (John 17:3; Acts 2:22,33, 36; Rom. 10:9) – the same scenario I experienced is played out over and over again. Believers in the one God and his Christ are rejected by former “Christian” friends and family.

 

By the authority given to him by the Father, the man Jesus will judge those who have mistreated God’s children (1 John 5:1, Acts 17:31). And, God’s children, that is, those who believe that Jesus is the Christ (1 John 5:1) need to keep in mind that social and economic pressures can be one way that God tests the genuineness of our faith.

 

We left Israel, among other reasons to help take care of my elderly parents, who are now 92 and 93 years old. My wife is their principal care-taker. We have settled near Nashville, TN to be part of a small congregation of one God believers. We’ve made new friends at the church, at other churches of like-minded faith, and through our two youngest children’s school and athletic activities, through adult and youth conferences, and through various online channels. As more and more people come to the saving knowledge that there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:4-5), more and more resources are becoming available: books, articles, podcasts, videos, websites, blogs, conferences, etc. It is exciting to be part of what some people have called “the 21^st Century Reformation.”

 

I keep busy doing some Hebrew Bible translation consultation for Spirit and Truth’s online Bible translation and commentary, the Revised English Translation (REV), watching our kids play soccer, selling the Satellite Bible Atlas, writing articles and producing the One God Report podcast.

 

ישמעו ענוים וישמחו – May the humble hear and rejoice! (Psalm 34:2)

 

#walkaway, #trinity, #billschlegel, #sonofgod, #godtheson, #biblicalunitarian