Chapter 7

One God: The Bible’s Answer

What Scripture and the creeds say about one God in three persons

Hear, O Israel

Three thousand years ago Israel was given one sentence to confess. Children learn it early, and the faithful have died with it on their lips. It is called the Shema, after its first Hebrew word, which means “hear.”

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Deuteronomy 6:4–5 (NKJV)¹

When a scribe asked Jesus which commandment came first, Jesus did not reach for anything new. He quoted the Shema word for word.

“The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. … Mark 12:29 (NKJV)

The question before us is what Jesus meant by “one.” Did He mean one God, or did He mean a group of Gods who agree with one another?

Finis Dake gave his answer, and he printed it beside the very verse Jesus quoted. His Study Bible’s note on Deuteronomy 6:4 is headed “Unity of God,” and its second point says there are “more than one Jehovah and more than one God as individuals,” who are one only “in unity.”² His course of study, God’s Plan for Man, defines the Trinity the same way. The three persons are “one in unity and eternal substance, but three separate and distinct persons as to individuality.”³ One entry earlier on the same page, he explains what kind of unity he means.

“It requires two separate persons to be a father and a son. They could in no sense be one person, but could be one in unity, as any two persons can be.” Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 51⁴

Dake is right that the Father and the Son are not one person. But the unity he leaves them is the unity of two friends, or of a husband and wife, or of partners in a business. Each is a separate being, and they are one because they agree. Chapter 6 set out his teaching in his own words and named it. This chapter gives the Bible’s answer.

Scripture teaches that God is one in being and three in person: one God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Dake taught three separate divine beings joined by agreement, and that teaching contradicts the very verse his note explains. Belief in three Gods is called tritheism, and the church has always called it heresy. The Athanasian Creed answers it in a single line: “they are not three Gods: but one God.”

Why the number matters

Some arguments about doctrine can wait for a quiet afternoon. This one touches the whole Christian life, because it concerns the One we worship.

Start with the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3). That command assumes a count. If God were three separate divine beings who agree, the command would become a house rule inside a household of Gods, and the word “other” would lose its force.

Think next about prayer. If the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three beings, each with His own body in His own place, a believer has to wonder which one is listening. The historic faith never faces that question. When you pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, you are speaking to one God, and the whole God hears you.

Think about the cross. If God is three separate beings, Calvary turns into an arrangement among parties. One divine being sends a second to suffer, and a third arrives afterward to apply the results. John 3:16 tells it differently. The love that gives the Son is God’s own love, and the Son who is given is God Himself.

Then there is worship. Scripture keeps worship for God alone. An angel in Revelation refuses it, and so does Peter in Acts. Yet Jesus receives worship again and again and never turns it away.⁵ If the three are three beings, then Christians worship three beings, and the prophets had a name for that. If they are one God in three persons, all our worship goes to the one God.

This is also no quarrel between Pentecostals and the rest of the church. The Pentecostal fellowships confess the historic Trinity. The Assemblies of God, for example, speaks of the Lord our God “as one Being of three persons.”⁶ The doctrine set out here is the doctrine of the churches where many of Dake’s readers sit on Sunday morning.

How many Gods the Bible counts

Moses and Isaiah

The Bible does not leave the number to hints. It states it again and again, often in the middle of Israel’s most important speeches. Moses says it twice in the sermon that leads up to the Shema.

“To you it was shown, that you might know that the LORD Himself is God; there is none other besides Him.” (Deuteronomy 4:35)

“Therefore know this day, and consider it in your heart, that the LORD Himself is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.” (Deuteronomy 4:39)⁷

Isaiah gives the same truth in God’s own voice, several times within a few chapters.

“Before Me there was no God formed, Nor shall there be after Me.” (Isaiah 43:10)

“I am the First and I am the Last; Besides Me there is no God.” (Isaiah 44:6)

“Is there a God besides Me? Indeed there is no other Rock; I know not one.” (Isaiah 44:8)

“I am the LORD, and there is no other; There is no God besides Me.” (Isaiah 45:5)⁸

Paul says it to a church in a city full of idols: “there is no other God but one.” James says it with an edge: “You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble!”⁹ These sentences count, and the count is one. When God says “I know not one,” He is telling us how many Gods there are.

Isaiah also shows what the count is for. In the same chapter God calls the whole world to Himself on the strength of it: “Look to Me, and be saved, All you ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other” (Isaiah 45:22). The invitation rests on the number. There is nowhere else to look, because there is no other God to look to, and so the nations can be called home.

Dake’s answer to the counting texts

Dake knew these verses needed an answer, and he gave one in his lesson on the Trinity. The singular language, he said, covers the whole Godhead the way a group name covers a group.

“Singular pronouns are sometimes used of the whole Godhead as a unit (Ex. 20:3; Isa. 44:6, 8; 45:5, 21; 46:9; Hos. 13:4; etc.), just like the whole church as the body of Christ as a unit is spoken of as a ‘man’ and ‘he’ (Eph. 2:14-15; 4:13; 5:25-27; 2 Thess. 2:7-8). The one Elohim then is not one person, or one in number, but one in unity.” Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, p. 480¹⁰

The comparison he chose works against him. The church is called one body, but the church is millions of separate people, and no one thinks it is one being. On Dake’s comparison, “the LORD is one” would mean that a collection of divine beings is one collection. Then Isaiah 44:8 becomes a strange sentence, because a collection does not say “I.” The verse has a speaker, and the speaker says He knows of no other God.

Dake did not hedge. Elsewhere in the course he told his students that it is “perfectly scriptural to use the plural word ‘Gods’ when we speak of three separate persons in the Godhead.”¹¹ Chapter 6 prints the whole passage. Isaiah hears God say that He knows of no other, and Dake teaches his students to say “Gods.”

Dake does allow that “one God” can mean one in number in some verses. Notice what the number counts when he does.

“From another standpoint, we can believe that ‘one God,’ ‘one Lord,’ and ‘one Spirit’ literally mean one in number in some cases, as is plainly stated in 1 Cor. 8:6; Eph. 4:3-6. These passages refer to single persons of the three persons in the Trinity.” Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 55¹²

On his reading, then, “one God” can mean a group of three who agree, or it can mean one member of the group. It never means one divine being, and that is the only meaning the prophets had in view. Dake never takes up the charge that his reading makes three Gods. His reply to every text in this section is that the three are “one in unity.”

What the word “one” can carry

Everything above turns on one small Hebrew word, so it deserves a careful look. Dake’s dictionary entry says that the word in “one Lord” “is achad, to unify, collect, be united in one, one in number.” Chapter 6 prints the whole entry. Its last sentence states a rule I am glad to accept.

“Whether one in unity or one in number is the meaning in a particular passage must be determined by Scripture and not by the meaning of the word itself.” Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, pp. 49–50¹³

That rule is right. The word alone cannot settle the question, and the passage has to decide. I will hold Dake to his rule, and I will hold my own side to it as well.

Begin with the Hebrew. The word for “one” (echad) is the ordinary number one.¹⁴ It is the word for one place, one day, and one man, and it carries no special sense of group unity. A related Hebrew verb means to unite, and Dake has folded the verb’s meaning into the number. That is why his entry says “to unify, collect, be united in one.” The number does not carry all of that by itself. When the waters in Genesis 1:9 are gathered into one place, no one pictures a committee of places. Ecclesiastes uses the same word for a man who is completely alone.

“There is one alone, without companion: He has neither son nor brother.” Ecclesiastes 4:8 (NKJV)

That is echad describing a man with no one else in the room, so the word does not always point to a group. My own side has to follow the same rule. Some defenders of the Trinity argue that echad always means a compound unity, and that Moses would have chosen another word if he meant simple oneness.¹⁵ That argument asks more of the word than it can carry, and Dake would be right to reject it. When Genesis 2:24 says a husband and wife “shall become one flesh,” the word does describe a union. But a husband and wife are two beings, and a Trinity built on that picture would be Dake’s Trinity, not the church’s.

So the passage has to decide, and the passage is clear. Deuteronomy 4 belongs to the same sermon as the Shema, preached by the same man to the same crowd, and it says “there is none other besides Him.” The Shema goes straight on to command love for this one LORD with all the heart, soul, and strength.

Mark’s Gospel shows how one of Jesus’ hearers understood the words. When Jesus quoted the Shema, the scribe answered Him in his own words.

“Well said, Teacher. You have spoken the truth, for there is one God, and there is no other but He.” Mark 12:32 (NKJV)

The scribe heard “one” and restated it as “there is no other but He,” and Jesus saw that he had answered wisely.¹⁶ Here is a reading of Deuteronomy 6:4 that Jesus approved out loud, and it is about how many Gods there are. Every time Scripture says that God is one, it stands beside a sentence saying there is no other. Dake’s own rule says the passage decides, and the passage decides against him.

The three who are the one God

Each is God

The same Scripture that insists on one God also presents the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as distinct from one another, and each of them as truly God. No one disputes that the Father is God. John says the Word was God and that all things were made through Him. Thomas saw the risen Jesus and said, “My Lord and my God!” The Father says to the Son, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.” Paul says that all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ bodily. Peter tells Ananias that he lied to the Holy Spirit, and in the next breath tells him he lied to God.¹⁷

John puts it another way. No one has seen God at any time, he writes, but the only begotten Son “has declared Him.” Hebrews says the Son is “the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.”¹⁸ An express image is the exact stamp a die leaves on a coin. A second being who only resembled God could never be called that. In the Son the one God makes Himself known.

The three are also truly distinct. The Son prays to the Father, the Father sends the Spirit, and the Spirit bears witness to the Son. None of that is play-acting, and the church has never said it was. So Scripture does two things at once. It says that God is one, and it presents three who are God and who are not each other. A sound doctrine has to keep both. Modalism keeps the one and loses the three, and Dake keeps the three and loses the one.

Baptized into one name

The clearest single sentence on this is the one Jesus gave His disciples at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. Dake built an argument on it.

“The preposition of and the conjunction and repeated each time before each of the three names in Matt. 28:19 further prove three separate persons. If one would say ‘a gift of John and of James and of George’ he means a gift from three persons, not one.” Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, p. 486¹⁹

He is partly right, and I say so gladly. The repeated “and of” does mark three persons, which is why the church says three persons and not one person in three roles. Dake made this argument against the Oneness teaching of his day, and on that point he defended the truth.²⁰ Now read the verse itself.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, … Matthew 28:19 (NKJV)

Jesus said “the name,” and the noun is singular. There is one name, and three share it.²¹ Dake’s own illustration shows the problem. A gift from John and James and George comes from three men who share no name at all; they are simply three of a kind. Jesus sent us to baptize into one name, which three persons share because they are one God.

Paul writes the same way. His closing blessing joins the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit in one sentence. In 1 Corinthians he goes further. He says “there is no other God but one,” and then confesses “one God, the Father” and “one Lord Jesus Christ.” The Shema confessed “the LORD our God” as one. Paul places the Father and the Son inside that one confession, and he does not think he has added a God.²²

One being in three persons

Many readers get lost at this point, so I will keep it as plain as I can. You can ask two different questions about anything. You can ask what it is, and you can ask who it is. You are a human being, and that answers what you are. You are also one particular person with your own name, and that answers who you are.

The church’s teaching about God keeps those two questions apart. Ask what God is, and there is one answer: one divine being, undivided. Ask who God is, and there are three answers: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The church’s Greek word for the being is ousia, and its word for each person is hypostasis.²³ One being in three persons is the whole formula.

Here is where the persons of the Trinity differ from three men. Three men share a kind of being, but each has his own being and his own existence, which is why we count them as three men. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit share the one being of God, whole and undivided, so they are one God. They are distinct, and they are never separate. Dake reads every distinction in Scripture as a separation. Whenever the Bible shows him two persons, he counts two beings, though the Bible never draws that line for him.

The church has had to reject three ways of breaking this teaching. Modalism says the three are one person in three roles, and so it loses the three. Arianism says the Son is a lesser being made by the Father, and so it loses His deity. Tritheism says the three are three beings who agree, and so it loses the one. The creeds were written to guard against all three at once.²⁴ Dake opposed the first firmly, and he confessed the deity of Christ against the second. The third is the one he taught. The same exchange of meanings runs through the rest of Dake’s vocabulary, and Appendix D gathers those terms in one table.

Dake’s proof texts in their own setting

Dake did not build his Godhead out of nothing. He built it from passages where two or three of the persons appear together. Those passages are real, and they deserve a real answer.

Daniel’s vision

Daniel 7 is one of them. Here is Dake’s reasoning.

“One reading of this passage by any honest person will prove to him that there are TWO separate persons referred to. The one sitting on the throne had to have a body, or He could not sit down, and He could not wear clothes or have hair on His head.” Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-seven, p. 487²⁵

Read the rest of the scene. The Ancient of Days wears a garment white as snow, and the hair of His head is like pure wool. His throne is a fiery flame, its wheels are a burning fire, and a fiery stream comes out from before Him.²⁶ If the hair proves a body, the wheels prove a machine, and God’s throne is on fire and rolling. Daniel tells us in the chapter’s first verse that he is reporting a dream and visions. In the same vision four kingdoms rise out of the sea as four beasts, and one of them has iron teeth. No one reads the beasts as zoology, and no one should measure God’s hair.

Daniel 7 does show two persons, and I am glad to say so. One like the Son of Man comes to the Ancient of Days and receives an everlasting kingdom, and all peoples serve Him. The Aramaic word for that service is the word Daniel uses for religious service to a god.²⁷ So the chapter shows two distinct persons and gives the second the service that belongs to God alone. That makes it one of the strongest Old Testament witnesses to the Trinity, and no help at all to tritheism.

The LORD who rained fire from the LORD

Genesis 19:24 stands near the head of Dake’s list of appearances. He reads it as two Lords. The Lord who appeared to Abraham, he says, rained fire upon Sodom “FROM the Lord [another one] out of heaven.”²⁸ The verse itself reads, “Then the LORD rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the LORD out of the heavens.”

Some readers take the doubled name as a Hebrew way of adding weight to the sentence. Others hear two persons in it, and I have no quarrel with them. So grant Dake his reading. Moses then calls both persons by one name, the LORD, the covenant name of Israel’s God. If these were two separate Gods, Moses gave them a single name and never told anyone. The verse shows two persons with one name, which is the pattern Jesus gave in Matthew 28:19.

“Let Us make man”

His other anchor in Genesis is the plural: “Let Us make man in Our image,” and “the man has become like one of Us.” Dake drew a firm conclusion from it.

“The phrase ‘AS ONE OF US’ means ‘like each one person of several persons of the same kind,’ as proved wherever it is used in Scripture or in any other literature. It could not mean anything else in English.” Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Five, p. 77²⁹

The key phrase is “of the same kind.” It makes the persons of the Godhead members of a kind, the way three men are members of ours. But look at the next verse in Genesis 1. The plural counsel is followed at once by a singular act: “So God created man in His own image.” God speaks in the plural and acts as one, and that is exactly what the creed was written to describe.

The baptism, Stephen, and John 17

The baptism of Jesus shows all three at once. The Son stands in the water, the Spirit comes down, and the Father speaks from heaven. I believe every word of it, and it is what the creed confesses: three distinct persons. But the scene does not give us three bodies in three places. The Father is heard as a voice, and the Spirit descends “like a dove.”³⁰ Dake also points to Stephen, who “saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” Stephen saw glory, and he saw a man. Jesus has a true human body forever, and that is the Incarnation, which I gladly confess. “The right hand” is the place of honor, as in Psalm 110, and it describes a rank rather than an address.³¹

John 17 is Dake’s text for divine unity. Jesus prays that His people may be one, “as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You.” Dake takes that to mean the unity of God is the same kind of unity that believers share. But “as” sets out a pattern to follow, and it does not make the two unities equal. If they were the same in kind, believers would be one God in the way the Father and the Son are, and no one believes that. Jesus is also describing more than a shared plan. He speaks of persons dwelling in one another: “I in them, and You in Me.”³²

Three who bear record

Dake cites 1 John 5:7 again and again, the verse about three who bear record in heaven. Those words are missing from the early Greek manuscripts, and most textual scholars regard them as a later addition.³³ Nothing in this chapter rests on that. The doctrine of the Trinity never needed the verse, and even as Dake printed it, the verse says the three “are one.”

The church’s sentence

A creed works like a fence around the Bible’s teaching. When teachers begin to use the Bible’s words with new meanings, a creed states what those words have always meant. On this question the sharpest of the creeds is the one that bears Athanasius’s name.

“And the Catholick Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son: and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. . . . So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty: and the Holy Ghost Almighty. And yet they are not three Almighties: but one Almighty. So the Father is God, the Son is God: and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods: but one God. . . . For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity: to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord; So are we forbidden by the Catholick Religion: to say, There be three Gods, or three Lords.” The Athanasian Creed, arts. 3–6, 13–16, 19–20³⁴

The creed forbids two errors. “Neither confounding the Persons” shuts out the teaching that God is one person in three roles. “Nor dividing the Substance” shuts out the teaching that God is three beings in an alliance. Dake spent his life pushing against the first wall, and he went straight through the second.

The Nicene Creed says the same about the Son in one phrase. He is “of one substance with the Father,” and the Greek word behind that phrase is homoousios, “of the same being.” The church chose it over a word that meant “of similar being.”³⁵ Christians argued over that one word for most of the fourth century, because everything depends on it.

What Dake’s defenders say

“He says one in eternal substance”

The strongest defense comes from Dake’s own definition. He wrote that the three are “one in unity and eternal substance,” which sounds close to the creed. A reader who loves this Bible can point to that line and say the charge of three Gods is unfair.

The answer is to ask what Dake meant by “substance,” and he tells us in his lesson on the Holy Spirit. Since the three persons are “entirely separate and distinct from each other,” he reasons, “it is only reasonable that each of them are the same in substance and nature,” with “the same kind of spirit-bodies, soul passions, and spirit-faculties.”³⁶ Then he explains himself by comparison.

“To be more specific, all angels have like spirit-bodies, souls, and spirits; all men have the same kind of bodies, souls, and spirits; all animals of the same species have the same likeness; and all demons are similar. Thus every person or thing in existence is similar to all other persons and things of the same nature and essence. So it is with God. All separate persons in the Godhead are the same in essence.” Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Twenty-five, p. 448³⁷

Dake explains sameness of essence by pointing to angels, men, animals, and demons. All men have the same kind of nature, and in that same way, he says, the persons of the Godhead are the same in essence. He means likeness of kind, while the creed’s word means one being. Three men who share a nature are three men, and three divine persons who share a nature in Dake’s sense are three Gods. The word “substance” survives in his definition, but its meaning has gone. Chapter 5 shows how much of his system runs on exchanges like this one.

“The Trinity is a contradiction”

Dake pressed the second defense himself, in a voice many of his readers find bracing.

Part of this I agree with. Christians sometimes hide behind the word “mystery” to avoid hard thinking, and “it is a mystery” has ended many Bible studies that should have kept going. Dake’s impatience with lazy answers is one of his good qualities.

A mystery and a contradiction are different things, though. A contradiction says that the same thing is true and false in the same sense at the same time. One person who is three persons would be a contradiction, and the church has never taught that. One being who exists as three persons involves no contradiction, because “being” and “person” answer different questions. The Trinity is beyond our full understanding, and I would expect that of God. Dake’s alternative is simpler, but it buys its simplicity by denying the Shema, which says there is no God besides Him.

“The creeds are Greek philosophy”

A third defense says the Hebrews thought in pictures and stories, and the creeds laid Greek philosophy over a Jewish book. Dake’s whole method leans on that idea. But look at where the counting sentences come from. “There is none other besides Him” is Hebrew, and so are “Besides Me there is no God” and “Hear, O Israel.” A heaven of related divine beings who share a nature and work together is the Greek picture, and the Roman and Canaanite one too. The creeds were written to keep the Hebrew sentences standing against that picture. On this question, the heaven of cooperating Gods is the pagan idea, and the one undivided God is the Jewish one.

One God, and no other

The case is now complete. Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, and James all count the true God, and the count is always one. Dake made the Father, the Son, and the Spirit three separate beings who are one only “as any two persons can be.” His own rule says the passage decides what “one” means, and every passage decides against him. His proof texts show distinct persons, which the church has always confessed, and none of them shows three beings. Three divine beings united by agreement is tritheism, and the church has always called it heresy. On the doctrine of God, Finis Dake was a false teacher.

The true doctrine gives the believer a great deal. It gives you one loyalty. You never have to wonder which member of the Godhead you are on good terms with, because there is no ranking in heaven to manage. When you love God with all your heart, all of that love lands on God.

There is one love at the cross. If God were three separate beings, Calvary could look like a bargain, with the Son coming through for you while the Father held out for justice. The Bible says that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. The love that sent, the love that came, and the love that now lives in you belong to one God.

There is one name over your baptism. Whatever water you went under, you went under one name, and you did not join an alliance. And you have God Himself. The Spirit who lives in you is God, personal and present and undivided. The historic Trinity is what makes Pentecost so large, because God did not send a delegate to fill His people; He came Himself.

And it gives you a God whose oneness cannot fail. In Dake’s system the unity of God is a unity of agreement, and agreement is something wills do. Dake never suggested that the three might disagree, and I do not say he taught it.³⁹ But a unity of agreement has to be kept up, while the unity of the one God is simply what He is. The Father loved the Son “before the foundation of the world,”⁴⁰ and that love was never a treaty between Gods. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!” There is no other, and this one God has come near to you in the Son and lives in you by the Spirit.