Rob Bowman on the Trinity Part 2

Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a Biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry.

With me today is Dr. Rob Bowman. Rob has written a number of articles on the subject of the Trinity, even a book dealing with it. Although, Rob, the book that you wrote on the Trinity deals more with Jehovah's Witnesses and their denial of the teaching of the Trinity. Is that not correct?

That's correct. In fact, one of the things that I bring to this subject of Mormonism and the Trinity is an awareness of how various religious groups have distorted or denied the doctrine of the Trinity, not just dealing with one group, but with several. That gives me a little interesting perspective when a group like Mormonism or somebody in Mormonism like Dan Peterson says, well, we agree with a lot of what you're saying here. We just disagree with this one point over here. Being aware of how different religions have revised Christian theology in the area of the doctrine of the Trinity has given me maybe a special sensitivity to the way certain people think that they're understanding something the same way when they're really not.

And that's what we're doing today. Yesterday, we began looking at an article by Dr. Daniel Peterson. You mentioned him. He's a professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University. And he is, as I think I said yesterday, he's kind of the go-to guy when it comes to defending the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He wrote an article back in April of 2018. I admit it's not a new article, but yet this topic is not really even new to Dr. Peterson.

He's written on this before. But as you mentioned yesterday, Rob, this is kind of a summary of some of the other things that he said about the doctrine of the Trinity. But what caught my attention, especially in this one, when you read the opening lines from this article, Defending the Faith, Where the Disagreement Lies, that's the title. If you were the average Christian reading this, I cannot see how you would not walk away thinking that he is saying that he agrees with everything that we would agree about the Trinity.

And let me explain myself to our listeners. He goes through five points. He says traditional mainstream Trinitarianism rests upon five propositions.

And yesterday we read them, and I want to recap in case someone didn't catch yesterday's show. One, the Father is God. Two, the Son is God. Three, the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit is God. Four, the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost is not the Father.

There is one God and only one God. I don't think most Christians would deny what he says in those five points. But as you were saying yesterday, towards the end of the show, we have to understand what they mean when they use these particular words. Why don't you elaborate on that?

Yes. The sentences that he gives to express the five basic propositions of the doctrine of the Trinity are good sentences. The problem is that Mormonism means different things by most of the words that are in all these sentences.

And the key word here really is God. Mormonism and Orthodox Christianity do not mean the same thing when they talk about God. They don't understand God in the same way. And so a big problem with this entire article and with much of the discussion, I'm afraid, that goes on between traditional Christians and Mormons is that they want to talk about the doctrine of the Trinity without bringing in other aspects of Christian theology.

And you really can't do that and be accurate because the Trinity is an aspect of the Christian doctrine of God, what his nature is, what he's like. And that needs to be fully brought into the discussion in order to understand the real big differences between what Mormonism says about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and what Orthodox Christianity says. Well, he says in this next paragraph after reading the five points, as I mentioned, both mainstream Christians and Latter-day Saints accept all five statements. And as you said, those statements certainly need to be clarified if we're going to really understand each other. Otherwise, we'll do what a lot of people do when they're talking with their Mormon friends. They talk past them, just assuming that they're saying the same things when they're really not.

That, of course, becomes problematic. Then he goes on into that paragraph. Dr. Peterson says they have little alternatives since all five are clearly scriptural. Take number five, for example. Now, number five was there is one God and only one God. Dr. Peterson, when he says take number five, for example, cites Deuteronomy 6-4.

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. And then, Rob, he also puts in parentheses, compare Isaiah 44-6, 46-9, Mark 12-29 and James 2-19 in the New Testament. Those are passages that I've often presented to Latter-day Saints. And I have found that most of the time when you get to the Isaiah passages, for instance, Isaiah 44-6, that they will try to say, well, that's only referring to idols, only referring to idols.

And certainly it doesn't speak to the oneness of God as traditional Christians would understand it. Now, let me just go to Isaiah 44-6, and this is what it says. I'm reading from, and I like to do this because it kind of takes that argument away that the Bible's not translated correctly, but this is the Joseph Smith translation that I'm reading from right now, which is very similar to the King James, where it says in Isaiah 44-6, Thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts, I am the first and I am the last, and besides me there is no God. Now, Joseph Smith in this passage, he touches the word besides, which in the King James is beside.

So he puts an S on there, but the meaning is basically the same. I'm the first, I'm the last, and besides me there is no God. Okay, most Mormons would say, well, that's talking about idols. But Dr. Peterson doesn't seem to take that position, is he? Well, he doesn't say what he thinks that verse means in context. All he's doing is saying that Mormons agree that there is only one God.

The problem here, of course, is what do you mean when you say there's only one God? Now, I have found that Jehovah's Witnesses say they agree with these verses. Mormons say they agree with these verses. Unitarians say they agree with these verses, and yet they have radically different concepts of deity, radically different concepts of the relationship between the Father and the Son. They're not the same belief systems at all, and they all have to understand a verse like Isaiah 44-6 differently, even though they are going to affirm that they agree with it.

Many people don't seem to understand. Just because people say that they agree with a statement in the Bible doesn't mean they believe the Bible. They're believing whatever belief system they have, and then they are in many cases simply accommodating the biblical texts to what they've already decided to believe.

And that's certainly the case here, because Mormonism, as it developed through Joseph Smith's later theology, completely abandoned the biblical monotheism that we see in passages like Deuteronomy 6-4 and Isaiah 44-6. It no longer believes that doctrine. Now, it stuck with the words, and like other anti-Trinitarian theological systems, it stuck with the words, and so it tries to accommodate those words, those biblical passages, to what their system of theology now teaches. But they don't really believe the Bible anymore. They're believing their theological position that they hold on other grounds, and then they're trying to make the verses fit.

And I think we can back up this accusation, and it is an accusation, I can back up this accusation just as we go along. We'll see as we talk about what Mormonism actually teaches that they don't believe these statements at all. He uses Isaiah 44-6, but if you look at verse 8, and this is, in my experience in talking with Latter-day Saints, a difficult passage for a Mormon to explain. When verse 8 says, Is there a God besides me? Yea, there is no God, I know not any.

Right. Doesn't that become difficult for the Latter-day Saint position, because if you believe that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three gods within the one Godhead, and they're one in purpose, and that's often how they explain it. Wouldn't you think that these three gods in the one Godhead, or unified in purpose, must know each other? You would think, and just to make matters even worse, in traditional Mormon doctrinal understanding, the speaker here is Christ. Jesus Christ, the Son, who is identified as Yahweh or Jehovah in the Old Testament, because verse 6 says, And that's Jehovah, or Yahweh in Hebrew, the King of Israel. He's the one that says these things. He's the one that says, Is there a God beside me?

I don't even know of any. Now, in Mormonism, Jehovah the Son is a subordinate deity under the rule of Heavenly Father, who is identified as Elohim in the Old Testament, a different God who is a superior God over Jehovah. So, how can Jehovah be saying to Israel, I don't know of any God besides me? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever in the context of Mormon theology. You would think so, but that sounds so simple to us, but I often find that a lot of Latter-day Saints, they do tend to stumble over this, and they can't really explain it. And again, going back to what we would call their tritheistic view of the Godhead, you would think that certainly these three gods would have knowledge of each other and recognize each other, if they are in fact one in purpose, as LDS members insist, and I would say even as the LDS church insists. I want to continue looking at what Dr. Peterson has said about this, and very quickly, he also goes on in this paragraph. He says, in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 8.6 also plainly teaches that there is only one God, though it actually seems to distinguish Jesus Christ as the Lord from that one God, the Father, a formulation that seems more congenial to the Latter-day Saint view than to orthodox, quote-unquote, Trinitarianism.

Could you talk about that very quickly before we end the show? Yes. Well, to be very quick here, what Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 8.6 takes the words, the language of Deuteronomy 6.4, which we mentioned earlier, the Lord our God is one Lord, and it applies this affirmation of monotheism to both the Father and the Son. So one God, one Lord, all of that language comes right out of Deuteronomy 6.4, which was the Jewish creed. And so what Paul is doing is he's saying, we are monotheists, there's only one God, and we see this one God in the one God, the Father, and in the one Lord, Jesus Christ. These are not two different deities.

This is the one God of Israel, now known to include the person of Jesus Christ. We're talking to Dr. Robert Bowman. If you want to see more of what he has written on this and other subjects, I encourage you to go to robertbowman.net, robertbowman, B-O-W-M-A-N, dot net, and you'll get a variety of topics that Rob has written on. Tomorrow we want to continue looking at this article by Dr. Daniel Peterson, Defending the Faith, Where the Disagreement Lies. Thank you for listening. If you would like more information regarding Mormonism Research Ministry, we encourage you to visit our website at www.mrm.org, where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.