I was an evangelical, Trinitarian Christian for 22 years. Then I believe God enlightened me one day about this, 45 years ago, while I was sitting in my home study room. I was reading Jesus’ Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24-25 (cf. Mark 13). Jesus was about to be crucified, and he was prophesying to his disciples about the future that involved his second coming. I knew this scripture well since I had specialized in Bible eschatology since I was 18 years old. I was now about 38 years old, thus 20 years later.
Did Jesus Lie about his Future Second Coming?
As I read Jesus’ statement about the time of his second coming, I blurted out loud to myself, “That makes Jesus look like a liar. He said he didn’t know the time of his return, yet he did know it because he is God.” What did I mean?
Let’s first consider what Jesus said. He told his disciples about his future second coming, referring himself as the Son of God and God as the Father, “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24.36; cf. Mark 13.32).
I made that exclamation due to my Trinitarian teaching. It was that Jesus is a co-equal member of the triune “godhead” and that he therefore knows the time of his second coming just as much as the Father does and the other personal member of this godhead knows, which is the Holy Spirit. Yet Jesus said to his disciples that he did not know.
Is the Hypostatic Union of Christ Biblical?
Trinitarianism had an answer for this. It had been determined at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451 that Jesus could say such things because he had two natures: a human nature and a divine nature, which they called “the hypostatic union of Christ.” And this formula was decided so that Catholic Church leaders could teach that Jesus did and said things according to one of his two natures at that specific time. In this case, they explained that Jesus made that pronouncement of not knowing the time of his return from the sole perspective of his human nature, but in his divine nature he certainly did know the time of his return because God knows everything, and Jesus is God because he has a divine nature.
So, for the first time in my life, I began to think that my identification of Jesus appeared contradictory, that he knew something in his divine nature, but he didn’t know it in his human nature. Thus, it looked like a contradiction if not a bald-faced lie. I then blurted out loud to myself again, “I will stand on the integrity of Jesus. I must look into this.” That I regard as the biggest understatement of my life. Why?
I Undertook a Massive Study
Even though I was a full time professional golfer on the PGA Tour, without any income coming from spending time reading and studying the Bible and biblical commentary about it, I launched into a massive study about this subject. I estimate that in the next 28 years, I read about a thousand books about the identity of Jesus. And it was not easy to get the books, most of which I got through the inter-library loan program. But perhaps most of this study was dedicated to my searching thousands of biblical commentaries in libraries, mostly theological libraries, about critical biblical texts.
For most Christians who attend a theological church (some are not at all), it’s about all they can do to get their heads around these complex subjects of the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, the Hypostatic Union, and how the Holy Spirit fits into all of this. Folks, I went way, way beyond all of that. I was driven! I look back on this and sometimes I shake my head, wandering out a layman, a person with no scholarly credentials, without a seminary education, was able to accomplish this.
Many say to me, “who do you think you are?” By this they insinuate that I am arrogant to oppose this important church teaching since I am untrained by the church. What a load that is! They don’t know the half of it! Folks, I tell you that if most professors did what I did, they would lose their jobs and face difficulty in employment and publishing. Just read in my book The Restitution about one of my heroes of the faith, Sir Isaac Newton and what he demanded of his associate and friend William Whiston about this and how Whiston refused and faced unemployment the rest of his life.
That’s why Sir Isaac, who believed exactly as I do, refused to ever go public with his theological writings, the volume of which surpassed all he wrote about science and mathematics! Folks, there is much pressure on professors at Christian institutions to toe the party line. I’m not saying this about all, but it is true about most.
Since my living never depended on that, I was free to explore and thus do as Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” (Matthew 7.7). I tell more about this subject in The Gospel Corrupted. But there is even more that I could tell about this that I have not.
It Resulted in My 600-Page Book The Restitution
And I took notes, a huge collection of notes in an organized system that I devised. Eventually, I wrote a book about it, a 600-page book that cites over 400 scholars. This book was self-published in 2008, 28 years after I began this critical examination into the identity of Jesus and the identity of God. (My publisher Wipf and Stock would have published it, but only in two volumes due to its size, which I wouldn’t accept.) I changed the title in 2023. It is now The Restitution: Biblical Proof Jesus Is Not God.
I then wrote and self-published a 100-page primer for The Restitution in late 2023 entitled The Gospel Corrupted: When Jesus Became God. Both books are available at amazon.com. The latter has an excellent rating of 4.8 out of a possible 5 and The Restitution has 4.6. See the scholars’ stellar endorsements of The Restitution on the back cover. And see some outstanding reviews of both books at amazon.com.
What Do I Mean Trinitarians Make It Difficult?
So, what do I mean by the title of this post—”Trinitarians Make It Difficult for People to Be Saved”? I mean that Trinitarians do so by claiming Jesus is God, God is three persons, and we must believe this to be saved, that is, for God to forgive us of our sins, receive God’s salvation, have the promise of eternal life, and thus be a genuine Christian—a true follower of Jesus as Lord and Savior.
I maintain that none of these propositions about God, Jesus, and salvation are true because they are NOT IN THE BIBLE. And that’s what counts. It does not matter what some church says, what the Catholic Church says, what the Protestant Church accepted about this from the Catholic Church. NO! We must never forget that churches are human organizations, and humans can get things wrong! The Protestant Church said SOLA SCRIPTURA (scripture alone), but has it done so regarding the doctrine of the Trinity? I don’t think so. And the word “Trinity” isn’t even in the Bible or anything like it!
Just look at how the Jews got it wrong about Jesus, pressuring the Romans to crucify him. Shouldn’t that be a sign for Christians to be careful about this? Oh, Trinitarians often offer the retort, that God’s Holy Spirit would never allow the church to go astray with such an important teaching as the doctrine of the Trinity. I say that’s not only BALONEY but it smacks of ARROGANCE! God let Jews go astray, but he won’t let Christian go astray? That may even be RACIST.
It’s Easier to Believe the Gospel than the Trinity
For those people who seriously think about religious or theological matters, it is more difficult to believe that God, the creator of this universe, literally came down from heaven to become a man, which Trinitarians call The Incarnation, referring to Jesus, than it is to believe simply what the Bible says—that Jesus was no more than a man, and God chose and sent him to be the Savior of the world by dying on the cross for our sins and proving it by raising him from the dead. Folks, that is the true gospel, the gospel of the Bible, the gospel of Jesus, and the gospel of the early Christians. It is the Catholic church fathers who later departed from this simple good news, corrupted this simple gospel, often being pressured to do so by politics, that is, by Roman emperors. They told the church to solve its arguments or else! What kind of or else? EXILE!
Just go read Philip Jenkins’ Jesus Wars, which tells what a disaster the long history of Trinity formulation was. Even though Jenkins remains a Trinitarian, he admits that the Council of Chalcedon “remade the faith” (p. 33). He says, “The government absolutely was involved in church debates at all stages” (p. 103). He reveals, “The debates that raged over Christ’s nature involved highly technical distinctions” (p. 62). At this fifth ecumenical council, it was much like what happened at the first ecumenical council, at Nicaea in 325. That is where they first decided that Jesus is “very God of very God” and put it in a creed at the emperor had demanded. The famous Edward Gibbon wrote mockingly of it (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2:373), “The profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong [a sound or a vowel] excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians.” The Nicene Creed says if people don’t believe Jesus is eternal God the church repeatedly declares therein they are “anathema,” meaning condemned to hell.
The Doctrine of the Trinity Is Not Biblical
The Bible absolutely does not teach that God is three persons or that Jesus is God and that he is one of those three persons. Folks, if any of you reading this are Trinitarian because your church has taught this to you, as my church taught it to me, I ask you: CHAPTER AND VERSE, PLEASE! What counts is what the Bible says, not what the church says. Search the scriptures as I did and you will see: (1) Jesus never claimed to be God; (2) twice in the Gospel of John, in John 5 and 10, some Jewish leaders accused him of claiming to be equal with God and even be God, and both times he denied it; (3) none of the 24 evangelistic messages in the book of Acts, or fragments thereof, most of which were proclaimed by Peter and Paul, say anything about Jesus being God.
How can Jesus’ two greatest apostles preach the gospel (good news) to people that they may be saved, and their messages say nothing about Jesus being God, much less that we must believe this to be saved. Folks, when we consider these dogmatic Trinitarian statements compared to the Bible, does not this Trinitarian dogmatism look like a corruption of true, genuine Christianity? I’m saying it certainly does. What do you say?
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