IronBladder
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Oneness folks juggle 4 different Christologies
Summary: Four Christologies.
I’d happen to regard Oneness as essentially a series of four different Christology’s which Oneness folk then juggle between at different times and in different situations:
Christology A: The Father is the deity of Jesus and the Son is Jesus’ humanity.
Christology B: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are mere titles borne or roles played by Jesus, at different times, and in different situations.
Christology C: Where the Father is deity as a disincarnate Spirit, whilst the Son is either deity incarnate as a man, or the deity incarnate inside of a man.
Christology D: Sometimes at a difficult passage such as Matthew 3:16-17, where the Father, Son and Holy Spirit all present simultaneously at Jesus’ baptism, to save face and avoid being proven wrong, some Oneness folk adopt a virtually Trinitarian position. They’ll then use this fourth position to refute the error of Tritheism which will be the ‘straw man’ doctrine of three separate Gods which they will have falsely set up as ‘Trinitarianism.’
The main result of this as I see, is that because it’s difficult to hit a moving target, by changing constantly between these views, it becomes almost impossible to define Oneness and therefore to refute it. The biggest problem with Oneness theology is the cross! As a God who is only one person cannot make an atonement for sin, to himself, a problem which also exists in Islam. For this reason, Baptism and tongues have all but replaced the cross as real the means of salvation in practice in most Oneness Churches, even if they do use the word ‘cross’ and still refer to ‘an atonement.’ So Oneness has now become a deceptive system of works salvation, which apes Trinitarianism so closely as to make it almost indistinguishable (to the average layperson), from it at times. So, being almost indistinguishable from it, this makes it extremely difficult for them to refute. For how do you refute an error which you cannot even distinguish from the Trinitarinism which it militantly opposes?
Oneness is therefore dishonest at heart, as they usually end up preaching a different gospel to different people. To the uninformed Trinitarian, their message is obey Acts 2:38 or go to hell, with more emphasis upon Christology A. But when the local Assemblies of God pastor calls, their gospel message becomes far more non-judgmental; God will judge those who are wrongly baptized they'll say and claim that they can’t judge anyone, and Christologies C and D where possible are used far more with the better educated Trinitarian than Christology A.
However in both cases the cross is always minimised. For Oneness theology is essentially a system of saving ourselves, by our own works, and completely apart from the grace earn’t by Christ's substitutionary atonement on the cross, which Oneness theology always plays down. Thus they either have to deny Christ’s deity on the cross and claim that a mere man (Son) offered a sacrifice for sins to the deity (Father). Or else, if they claim that Christ is the one person of God, then this forces them to deny that the Son became the sin offering and then offered up the sacrifice of himself to himself, because God the Father is not the Son.
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6/12/2007, 3:52 pm
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