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Did More Than One God Create the World?
Was the universe made by
more than one God? The quick answer is that only one God created the universe, but
this needs some more explanation since more than one Being is God according to
Christian teaching.
A number of texts in the Bible clearly
affirm that God is one Person. For
example, Deuteronomy 6:4 has the
beginning of what the Jews call “the shema.”
This passage, which every good Jew has memorized by heart in Hebrew,
reads: "Hear, O Israel! The Lord [Jehovah] is our God, the Lord
[Jehovah] is one." Paul said in
Galatians 3:20: “Now a mediator is not
a mediator of one, but God is one.”
Likewise the brother of Jesus wrote in James 2:19: “You believe that there is one God, you do
well; even the demons believe and tremble.”
Paul noted that “since it is one God who will justify circumcision by
faith, and uncircumcision through faith” (Romans 3:30). God proclaimed through one of the greatest
Old Testament prophets (Isaiah 44:6-8):
“So says 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. . . .
So you are My witnesses. Is there a God besides Me? Yea, there is none.” Elsewhere David proclaims (2 Samuel 7:22),
“Therefore You are great, O LORD God. For there is none like You, neither is
there any God besides You, according to all that we have heard with our ears.” One scribe correctly told Jesus (Mark
12:32).” Right, Teacher, according to truth You have spoken, that God is one,
and there is no other besides Him.” So
Scripture clearly affirms that there is only one God.
But
is that all that the Bible teaches? Is God
just one Person, as Jews and Muslims teach?
Although the Bible reveals that God is one, it also says that more than
one person is God. One of the most
important texts in this regard is John 1:1:
Its opening verse affirms the Deity of Christ: "In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Since in verse 14 "the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,"
the Word undeniably was Jesus. To evade
this verse, Unitarians, who say that God is one Person only, have argued that
the "Word" merely was a thought in the Father's mind, since verses
2-3 refer to the "Word" impersonally. (For verse 2, the NASB literal marginal rendering is "This
one.") This argument is simply
unpersuasive, since this "thought" is called "God," and because
this "thought" was the Creator "itself" in verse 2: "All things came into being by Him, and
apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being." Could a mere "thought" alone in
the Father's mind create the universe by itself?
Now the word translated "one"
in Deut. 6:4 is "echod." This
word can mean composite unity, not an indivisible, solitary unity. Genesis 2:24 uses the word "echod"
thus: "For this cause a man shall
leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall
become one flesh." Here two
separate individuals become "one."
Similarly, the giant cluster of grapes carried on a branch between two
of the spies scouting out the Holy Land for Israel was "echod" (Num.
13:23). Despite apparently having hundreds
of grapes, the cluster still was called "one" or
"single." The Greek word for
one, "heis," merely repeats the same story, since it can refer to
composite unity as well. For example,
the analogy between the human body and the church makes "one" out of
many (I Cor. 12:12): "For even as
the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the
body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ." Similarly, many can be "one" in
Phil. 2:2 (NKJV): "fulfill my joy
by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one
mind." The non-spurious part of I
John 5:7 (ASV) makes three into one:
"For there are three who bear witness, the Spirit, and the water,
and the blood: and the three agree in one." In light of this Scriptural evidence, it's
wrong to insist the texts that affirm God's oneness must mean God is one
single Person (center of consciousness).
Clearly,
the Old Testament refers to God as both the "Creator" and
"Creators," as the "Maker" and "Makers." A Unitarian, who believes God is just one
Person, could accuse a Binitarian, who believes God is made made up two Persons
who are One God, of "a mathematical impossibility." However, Hebrew agrees with the latter's
viewpoint by implicitly portraying God as "one," but that
"one" is defined in a way that allows for a multiplicity of Beings
(re: Gen. 3:22, "like ONE of
US.") Because a whole major
doctrine might not be fully revealed in one place in the Bible since its bits
and pieces may be scattered about within it, Binitarian teaching isn't
self-contradictory. The Unitarian view
has the burden of explaining away the many pieces that don't fit it, while the
Binitarian view embraces the evidence that portrays God as one as well as the
evidence favoring more than one Person being God. Hence, the Binitarians aren't "making the exception the
rule" or engaging in selective proof-texting, but they are formulating a
doctrine that explains ALL of the evidence, anomalous facts to
Unitarianism included, not just a good part of it.
GENESIS 1:26 REMAINS AN
OBSTACLE TO UNITARIANISM
Does the Old Testament ever attribute to
God a plurality of Persons? Although
Hebrew term for God, "elohim," is in the plural, it almost always
takes singular verbs or pronouns. But a
few exceptions do arise (Isa. 6:8; Gen. 11:7), most notoriously Gen. 1:26: "Then God said, 'Let US make man in OUR
image, according to OUR likeness.'"
Those asserting monotheism requires God to be a single Person commonly
employ two interpretive strategies to evade this text's implications. One asserts that God spoke to the angels
here. But since Scripture never says
the angels are creators, even assistant creators, this claim is totally
unpersuasive. Another approach
maintains God here used the "plural of majesty," as Queen Victoria
did in this statement attributed to her, "We are not amused." Of course, the question then becomes why God
almost never uses the plural of majesty, even when in Isaiah He is affirming
His greatness compared to His creation and mankind, except in a very few,
isolated cases. (A serious scholarly
investigation should be launched to see how and whether Israelite and other
kings of a Semitic culture commonly used the plural of majesty, or whether it
appeared in myths about false gods of the ancient Middle East). But must ambiguity reign? Notice Gen. 3:22: "Then the Lord God said, 'Behold, the man has become like
one of Us, knowing good and evil.'"
This construction can't be explained as a "plural of majesty"
because "one" is set against "Us." Despite being not the most straightforward
interpretation, the claim God used the "plural of majesty" in Gen.
1:26 may not be able to be decisively refuted at the present state of knowledge. But in light of Gen. 3:22, the view
"Elohim" can't refer to a plurality of Persons in the Godhead wears
exceedingly thin.
Consider the cases where God uses plural pronouns when
speaking, starting with the classic text on the subject: "Then God said, 'Let Us make man in Our
image, according to Our likeness'" (Gen. 1:26). Belying the claim that this is a supposed "plural of
majesty," the Jews anciently had trouble explaining this text. In the Midrash Rabbah on Genesis, one
rabbi made the following comments on it:
Rabbi Samuel bar Naham in the name of Rabbi Jonathan
said, that at the time when Moses wrote the Torah, writing a portion of it
daily, when he came to this verse which says, 'And Elohim said, let us
make man in our image after our likeness.'
Moses said, Master of the Universe, why do you give herewith an excuse
to the sectarians [i.e., Christians], God answered Moses, You write and whoever
wants to err let him err."
Obviously,
if this text and those like it could be explained away as the plural of
majesty, the rabbi(s) who wrote this passage could have easily disposed of this
text's potential problems, since they certainly knew how Hebrew worked.
THE PLURAL OF MAJESTY IS A
HOAX!
According to Morey, during the intense nineteenth-century
debates between Unitarians and Trinitarians, the plural of majesty was revealed
to be a hoax popularized by the famous Jewish scholar Gesenius. Using the plural of majesty to explain this
and other passages away commits the fundamental mistake of reading a modern
monarchical convention back into Scriptures originally written millennia ago
when this form of speech was unknown.
As the scholar Nassi notes, the plural of majesty was "a thing
unknown to Moses and the prophets. Pharaoh,
Nebuchadnezzar, David, and all the other kings throughout . . . (the
Law, the Prophets, and the Hagiographa) speak in the singular, and not as
modern kings in the plural. They do not
say we, but I, command; as in Gen. xli. 41; Dan. iii 29; Ezra i. 2,
etc." Compounding their error, the
Unitarians attempt to explain even the plural word "elohim" away as a
form of the plural of majesty, forgetting that the use of the royal
"we" is limited to direct discourse and commands, not narratives or
descriptions. Given this kind of evidence,
citing the authority of Gesenius or Bullinger is simply not persuasive as any
kind of real proof that the Hebrew really does use the plural of majesty. The Unitarians and Arians should completely
abandon this argument if they can't cite ancient Semitic literature in which
kings used the plural of majesty.
Consider the three other cases where the God of Israel
used plural pronouns: "Then I
[Isaiah] heard the voice of the Lord [Adonai], saying, "Whom shall I send,
and who will go for US?" (Isa. 6:8).
"And the Lord [Yahweh] said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they
all have the same language. . . .
Come, let US go down and there confuse their language, that they may not
understand one another's speech" (Gen. 11:6-7). "Then the Lord [Yahweh] God said, 'Behold, the man has
become like ONE of US, knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:22). To explain away such anomalous facts of
Scripture, the Unitarian has to invent unconvincing ad hoc explanations, such
as "the plural of majesty," "the angels were speaking or being
spoken to," etc. By contrast, the
Binitarian's teaching, which maintains that God is one but more than one being
is God, effortlessly glides over such passages while still comfortably fitting
the many more places where God uses singular pronouns.
It has been said that the plural of majesty isn't a hoax
because in the Quran (Koran) of Islam Allah extensively uses "We,"
not "I." However, there still
is a gap of over 2000 years between the time of Moses and the time of Muhammad,
so something more ancient, and thus concurrent with the writing of the Hebrew
Scriptures, is necessary to make this point stick. Admittedly, as John Wheeler has observed in a letter written to
me dated December 24, 1998, the use of the plural noun with a singular verb
used in agreement appears elsewhere in the OT, such as Wisdom in some Proverbs,
the Behemoth in Job, and "your teachers" in Isa. 30:20. However, this still doesn't refute Morey's
point about the plural of majesty (or, perhaps more precisely, the "royal
we") being limited to direct discourse when spoken aloud. The question remains about why such terms
are sometimes plural in form, and sometimes aren't, when power or might is
implied may not be, strictly speaking, a "plural of majesty" because
no monarch (including God) is speaking directly when they appear. Still, this issue remains, and constitutes
one for further research: Did ancient
Semitic monarchs or gods use the "royal we" in historical records or
myths? The Unitarians are welcome to
find any evidence available for their cause from the first or second millennia
b.c.
So
the Bible teaches that one God created the world, but that more than one Person
is God. A “committee” of gods didn’t
make the universe.
Sincerely,
Eric
Snow
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Why does God Allow Evil?
Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why
Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
May Christians work on
Saturdays? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Protestant
Rhetoric vs Sabbath Refuted.htm
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and Hereafter.htm
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Is the United States the
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We the Beast vs Collins.htm
Should you give 10% of
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the Argument from Silence Abolish the Old Testament Law of Tithing 0205 Mokarow
rebuttal.htm
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