The Oneness Trinitarian Pentecostal Doctrine Introductory Musings Of An Editor

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Pneuma 30 (2008) 197-202

The Oneness-Trinitarian Pentecostal Doctrine:

Introductory Musings of an Editor

Frank D. Macchia

I was only nineteen when I accompanied two friends into a local Apostolic Pentecostal Church for worship. We had noticed the sign outside advertising a Pentecostal revival meeting featuring a visiting evangelist. I was aware that there was a doctrinal difference over the Godhead between my Assemblies of God church (pastored by my father) and the one I was visiting that night, but my friends convinced me that our hunger for a revival meeting warranted attending the service anyway.

The preacher that night was riveting. The fact that the sound system was much too loud and the microphone held too close to the evangelist’s mouth did not stop me from appreciating his message (of course, I was naturally accustomed in the Pentecostal churches of my own upbringing to such assaults on my hearing). I still remember that his sermon lifted up Jesus as the Savior and Healer in a broken world hungry for God. I was moved to tears. I was made to want more of Jesus in my own life. T at sermon and the songs and prayers off ered to God in that service could have graced any Assemblies of God church and been welcomed with outstretched arms.

I joined the group of worshippers at the altar after the conclusion of the message. The fact that I was a stranger to the congregation brought a few altar workers around me to see if I had accepted Jesus. I told them that I had but that I wanted to pray for a deeper walk with God. We prayed together for a while and I was touched by their love for me. Out of concern for me they asked me whether I had accepted baptism in Jesus’ name. “Why was that important?” I asked. Acts 2:38 was the immediate answer, quoted to me in perfect King James English. The answer made perfectly good sense to them. If Jesus as the Savior is the focal point of the Gospel, if one gains entry to God through him, why not baptize in his name? After some discussion, they were not able to convince me to be rebaptized. I simply told them that I had to discuss such matters with my father. Upon discussing the matter with my dad

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/157007408X346302

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later, however, he reminded me that I had indeed been baptized in Jesus’ name. To be sensitive to persons from a Oneness background (and to take no chances at being in any way less than thoroughly biblical), my father baptized all con- verts (including me) in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I think I was destined from that moment on to be involved in Oneness/Trinitarian Pentecostal conversations!

I walked away from that Oneness church that night impressed by their devotion to Christ and the power of the Spirit. Yet, their views of baptism and God were diff erent from my own church’s views. I was made to consider at a relatively young age both the importance and limits of doctrinal formulations for regulating the language of faith and other forms of devotion within a given church. In an eff ort to be faithful to Scripture, doctrinal formulations exist in continuity with, and in service to, our worship, adoration, and mission. T ey play an enormously important role in guiding and enhancing our devotion and faithfulness to God. Yet, no language can adequately capture God or adequately express our worship and adoration. It may even be possible to appreciate to some extent doctrinal formulations with which one’s own church has disagreed. As Geroge Lindbeck has shown us in his classic, The Nature of Doctrine, the regulatory function of doctrine can help us in certain instances to understand and even to fi nd some value in doctrinal formulations that might sound strange or problematic from the vantage point of our own tradi- tions, because of the way in which these formulations might have functioned to guide a community of faith in its eff ort to appropriately respond to various internal and contextual realities. Because of doctrine’s regulatory function, doctrine may be called the “grammar of faith.”

The Oneness-Trinitarian Pentecostal dialogue raises an interesting question in the light of Lindbeck’s ecumenical understanding of the regulatory function of doctrine: How wide or diverse is the spectrum of this realm of ecumenical appreciation within the Christian family? For example, if doctrine is the gram- mar of faith, how much diversity is allowable within the Christian tradition for regulating the use of the terms, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?” To press the grammar metaphor further, all Pentecostals agree that these terms function in some sense as adverbs, describing God’s involvement in history (God functions or is manifested in a fatherly way, or in fi lial manner, or as a spiritual presence). But can we stop there as the Oneness Pentecostal Movement has done? Or, must we go further as do Trinitarians to insist that these terms also function in a specialized sense as adjectives, describing who God is eternally?

Oneness and Trinitarian Pentecostal grammars diff er on this point. We would consider each other’s grammars defective to some extent and not prop-

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erly faithful to revelation or regulatory of our shared devotion to God the Father, to Christ, and to the life of the Spirit. The Oneness Pentecostals would charge that the Trinitarians are not thoroughly faithful to the Oneness of God or to the full deity of Jesus as the “fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9) (his being not just the incarnation of a “third” of God or of a subordinate “second person” of the Godhead). The Trinitarian Pentecostals would charge Oneness Pentecostals with ignoring the full thrust of those texts that reveal the rich inter-relationalality of Father, Son, and Spirit (e.g., Lk. 3:22; John 17:5; 1 Cor. 2:10; Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3), as well as the necessary correlation between this revelation and who God is eternally in Godself (each person in commu- nion being both distinct from the other persons and enjoying the fullness of deity). Besides, it is sometimes noted that Colossians 2:9 is actually a reference to the reality of the risen Christ as the revelation bodily of the fullness of the divine presence, namely, through glorifi cation.

At any rate, these diff erences are serious, but do they prevent us from appre- ciating our shared devotion to God as Father, Son, and Spirit? In other words, our grammars diff er, and this diff erence is very signifi cant, but we still share the same biblical text, similar core practices, similar language, and the Pente- costal accent on the miraculous gifts of the Spirit and on the work of the Spirit as the only hope for being transformed into the very image of Christ. Most of all, we share the same focus on Jesus as the divine Son of God and as the one who bestows the Spirit and to whom the Spirit bears powerful and abundant witness as the Savior of the world. This commonality is no small matter! In fact, it is truly signifi cant that the Oneness/Trinitarian controversy became early in the debate an argument over which baptismal formula adequately accounts for the attainment of the fullness of life in Christ. The Oneness insisted that Jesus is the locus of the Spirit’s presence and is thus the only proper mediator of the Spirit to us. Baptism must recognize this central role for Jesus and be in his name (1 Cor. 6:11). The Trinitarian Pentecostals wanted to note that the role of Jesus as Savior was played out in communion with his heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit (Lk. 3:22). Baptism best conveys this story in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit (Matt. 28:19). The Oneness countered that the name of this formula must be Jesus, which avoids demoting him to the mere function of only one player among three in our salvation. In a sense, he is, as the incarnation of the one God, the central player. The Trinitarians countered that collapsing the Father and the Spirit into a general deity indwelling Christ ignores those texts that speak of the eternal inter-relationality of the persons, implying that eternal deity is a com- munion of persons. Besides, as it is sometimes argued, the indwelling of the

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Spirit in Christ is a weak doctrine of incarnation and borders on adoptionism or at least Nestorianism. And the argument goes on.

Interestingly, our great strength as a Movement (a strong focus on Jesus as the Savior that does not eclipse an equally strong pneumatology) has turned out to be the theological context from which our deepest division would arise. We can’t go back to square one, to our early devotion to Jesus as the locus of the fullness of life and try to re-think this whole matter of the baptismal for- mula, along with the meaning of baptism and the Godhead, all over again. We cannot go back in time. But neither can we ignore at the core of our shared history a deep devotion to Jesus and to the fullness of the life of the Spirit in him that binds us to each other. We cannot ignore each other or simply rest content with anathemas. We are forced to ask, “In actuality, how deep and devastating are our diff erences?”

Let’s start here: What about my father’s baptismal formula? Can Trinitarian Pentecostals appreciate the fact that Jesus’ name can have a valued place in a baptismal formula, given the historic Pentecostal accent on the power of Jesus’ name in casting out the dark powers and in the healing of the soul and body? I am not advocating the removal of the cherished Trinitarian formula, only an appreciation for the Christological focus of the other formula. After all, salva- tion in Jesus’ name in Acts (e.g., 4:12) recalls the Trinitarian story of Jesus as the Son sent by the Father in the power of the Spirit to secure salvation for all fl esh (cf. Acts 10:38-43). In this light, how can we play “Father, Son, and Spirit” off against “in Jesus’ name?” Does not the one formula imply the other? I wouldn’t propose that any ecclesiastical body accept my father’s formula, but the mere fact that Oneness and Trinitarian Pentecostal communities could appreciate such a formula together would symbolize a shared experience and a shared biblical drama at the core of our diff erences. After all, the terms “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” need not be a red fl ag for Oneness within a baptismal formula nor should Jesus’ name imply a sell out for Trinitarian Pentecostals. We would both have diff erent understandings of the full implications of a combined formula, but could we not agree that at the base of it is the shared conviction that in Jesus is the fullness of life? For the Oneness this life would be the life of the one God manifested as Father, in the Son, and as the Spirit. For Trinitarians, it would be the life or communion shared by us within the one God as Father, Son, and Spirit. But we would all fi nd in the risen Christ “a life giving Spirit” (1 Cor. 15:45).

Of course, the issue of the Godhead cannot be ignored. Take, for example, A. D. Urshan’s cryptic but also provocative reference to “a mysterious, inexpli- cable, incomprehensible three-ness” to the eternal being of the one God, even

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though in his view this three-ness does not involve separate “persons” (see paragraph 48 in the Final Report). Is this language a fundamental betrayal of God or a tolerable exploration at the boundaries of Oneness doctrine? If the latter, is it not possible for Oneness believers to fi nd some value in Trinitarian dogma even if they continue to be critical of what they perceive to be the tritheistic implications of the development of Trinitarian theology historically? On the other hand, can Trinitarians appreciate the dificulty involved in using the term “persons” today to describe the one God, given the modern under- standing of the word as a depiction of an autonomous ego? One may call Urshan inconsistent, but he was no more so than Karl Barth was when he arrived at a similar understanding of the Trinity in volume one, part one of his classic Church Dogmatics, namely, as the one God who is Lord three times over through three eternally-distinct “modes of being.”

I’m not proposing that we all become Barthians (not really!). But my discus- sion of Urshan and Barth is simply meant as an illustration of the fact that a strong monotheism does not necessarily exclude some appreciation for an eternal self-distinction in God that corresponds with the role of Father, Son, and Spirit in the story of Jesus, even if these distinctions are not termed “per- sons.” After all, it is possible to say that Father, Son, and Spirit are eternally distinct but that each enjoys the fullness of deity since they subsist eternally in the one God. If such is possible, to view the incarnation as belonging uniquely to the Son does not necessarily deny the presence of the fullness of deity in Christ. On the other hand, a more robustly relational understanding of the Trinity as an eternal communion of “persons” can still involve an enhanced appreciation for the theological signifi cance and beauty of the oneness of God. Is there no way that we can develop some appreciation for each other’s doctri- nal histories, without compromising what is essential to our distinctive accents? I think there are signs of such an appreciation already in evidence among some Oneness and Trinitarian Pentecostals.

In the light of the importance of such questions, we can conclude that this is without a doubt a historic moment. T eologians from Oneness and Trini- tarian Pentecostal churches have sat down at the table to formally discuss their commonalities and diff erences candidly and with mutual respect. The pages that follow contain the Final Report of fi ve years of dialogue (the sixth year being devoted to the Report). A reading of this Report will show that the two sides even pushed at the boundaries in a few places to see if there might not exist some fresh areas of common witness possible, although the teams were careful not to compromise the historic positions of the churches that they represented.

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I am grateful to the church leaders (former Presiding Bishop James A. John- son, General Superintendent Kenneth F. Haney, and General Superintendent George Wood) who took the time in their busy schedules to read the Report and to off er brief words of refl ection. Bishop Johnson even played a consulting role throughout the drafting of the Report on the Oneness Pentecostal side (having also served for two years in the dialogue), and Superintendents Haney and Wood commissioned a lengthier response from someone within their respective churches as well. I am also grateful to all of the respondents for tak- ing the time to off er lengthy critiques. In particular, I am especially grateful for Daniel Ramirez’s compelling plea for a more globally diverse dialogue (and renditions of Pentecostal history), Ralph Del Colle’s point about the impor- tant role of the baptismal formula in preserving the essential core of a church’s confession, David Reed’s insight into the diff erent Christologies (and atone- ment theologies) typically shared by Oneness and Trinitarian Pentecostals, and the general care exercised, not only by Del Colle and Reed, but also by Wil- liam Menzies, Daniel Segraves, and Richard Shaka, in interacting with the fi ner points of the Report. Menzies and Segraves interacted with the Report at the behest of their Superintendents, off ering us a careful analysis from the vantage points of their churches.

This dialogue was never meant to represent the fi nal word on Oneness/ Trinitarian commonalities and diff erences, nor did we pretend to speak for all Oneness and Trinitarian Pentecostals (as we were careful to note on occasion in the Report). This was only meant as an initial encounter between Oneness and Trinitarian Pentecostals who had been for the most part already active in dialogue informally within the Society for Pentecostal Theology. The planners of a second round, should it occur, would rightly seek to diversify the conversa- tion. The challenge will be in how to do this across educational and language barriers and without current funding for expensive travel and hotels, not to mention in the face of the dificulty involved in talking candidates with both church standing and academic preparation into fi tting a six-year dialogue into their already overloaded schedules. But any diversifi cation of the conversation, no matter how modest, would certainly play a profound role in the future of the conversation.

I off er this Report and its responses as a launching pad for further discus- sion in deep gratitude to the Society for Pentecostal Theology for sponsoring the conversation as well as to everyone who worked so hard to bring it to comple- tion. May our eff orts at conversation uplift Jesus as Lord in the power of the Spirit and to the glory of our heavenly Father.

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