Publisher's Synopsis
This first volume of Concise Studies in the Scriptures was previously entitled God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit - It's No Mystery! However, this new third edition with its more appropriate title presents a major rearranging and reworking of the previous book. This book deals with the major subject of Christianity, namely, who is God? Is God one person? This is called Unitarianism. Or is He an essence consisting of two persons-Father and Son? This is called Binitarianism. Or does He consist of three persons-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is called Trinitarianism and is the traditional belief. Also, it is vital to examine the equally important question of: Is Jesus the completely human "Son of God"? Or is he 'God the Son' who pre-existed as a second person in the Binity or Trinity? Furthermore, some believe that Jesus pre-existed, but came into existence as an archangel! This is called Arianism. If, however, God is one person but can appear in different modes, did He leave heaven and come down into Mary's womb in the 'mode' of a human-so that "God the Father" became the baby Jesus? This is called Modalism. These issues have raged since the second century when Jewish Christianity had gone out into the Gentile world with that world's pagan Platonic philosophies. Most importantly, the Jews of Judaism, throughout its history, never taught that God consisted of two or three persons in one essence. So the key question is: Did Jesus or any of his Bible-writing representatives change that belief? Did they reveal a truth that the Jews were unaware of? In other words was Jesus really a Binitarian or a Trinitarian? Or did he confirm a strict Unitarian monotheism concerning His heavenly Father? It is claimed that the Christianity of the churches is one of the three great monotheistic religions, the other two being Judaism and Islam. However, with the definition of monotheism being the worship of one God, we must ask: Can a teaching of three persons in one God truly be monotheistic? The importance of this subject of "who God is" can hardly be overstated and this book demonstrates that the Bible teaches an entirely Unitarian view of who God is. In other words: God is one person, the Father. Furthermore, it shows that Jesus never literally pre-existed and has always been 100% human as existing from his conception in Mary's womb. However, because the predominant teaching of the churches is that of Trinitarianism the material in this book focuses on the falseness of that view according to the Bible but, naturally, some of this information is also applicable to Binitarianism and to a lesser extent Modalism. Certainly, these last mentioned doctrines are also a deviation from the original belief about God as found in ancient Judaism, in Jesus' teachings, in the words of the Apostles, as well as those of the earliest Church fathers. This book also examines the associated Trinitarian doctrines of the eternal generation of the Son, the hypostatic union, kenosis, perichoresis, and coinherence-strange terms indeed, but ones that will be explained in the book! Indeed these terms are all man-made doctrines as ways to try to explain the Trinity. Furthermore, some defenders of the Trinity doctrine try to use analogies in this futile endeavour-futile because their analogies do not actually fit with the Trinity. Interestingly in the 1950's Pope Pius granted Catholic scholars significant freedom for a most in-depth examination of the Scriptures on this subject of who God and Jesus are, supposedly without fear of any heresy charges concerning what they discovered. At the same time a number of Church of England bishops and scholars convened meetings to discuss the issue of who Jesus really was. The Lutheran Church also became involved in the same investigations. The conclusions were startling for these Churches.
