Modern Worldviews and the Deity of Christ

By Robert M. Bowman Jr.

[The first five installments of this series are available at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. Part 6, below, concludes the series.]

Unitarianism refers classically to the Christian heresy that God is a single person (hence, no Trinity) and that Jesus Christ is an exalted man. The doctrine originated in the sixteenth century and found formal theological expression in the writings of Laelius Socinus and especially his nephew Faustus Socinus. The term Unitarianism is also often used for modern versions of Arianism, the fourth-century doctrine of Arius of Alexandria, which affirms that Christ existed before his human life. The best-known advocates of this doctrine today are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose view of Christ we discussed in an earlier installment of this series. Socinianism, on the other hand, denies any such preexistence of Christ. Our focus in this article is on the Socinian form of Unitarianism.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most Unitarians became increasingly liberal in their theologies. Mainstream Unitarianism in Britain and the United States dispensed with the infallibility of the Scriptures, the virgin birth of Christ, and eventually practically every major element of Christian doctrine. The Unitarian-Universalist Association that emerged in the twentieth century is now so liberal that only a minority of its members even profess to be Christians or to believe in a personal God.

In the late twentieth century, classic Unitarianism began enjoying something of a revival. These Unitarians often refer to themselves as Biblical Unitarians, largely to distinguish themselves from Unitarian-Universalists. They affirm the authority of the Bible and espouse a theistic worldview. They agree that God is a personal being and the Creator and Ruler of all things. They also accept such traditional divine attributes as omnipotence and omniscience.

Unitarians agree with historic Christianity that Jesus was born of a virgin, died on the cross for our sins, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. However, they deny that Christ existed in heaven before his human life. Only when Jesus ascended into heaven, according to Unitarians, did he become divine, and even then in a subordinate role to the Father, who alone is the real God.

Denominations espousing this Unitarian theology include the Christadelphians and the Church of God General Conference. Anthony Buzzard is the movement’s best-known theologian and Dale Tuggy its best-known philosopher.[1] In 2019 Tuggy and others founded the Unitarian Christian Alliance to foster fellowship among Unitarians as well as to defend Unitarian belief.

What “Biblical Unitarians” and liberal Unitarians have in common is a rationalistic insistence on the strict application of logic (as they understand it) to theology. While Unitarians do claim biblical support for their doctrines, their criticisms of the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation focus on their supposed irrationality. For example, Buzzard criticizes the doctrine that Jesus is both divine and human by stating flatly, “One person cannot at once be both infinite and finite.”[2] He dismisses the very idea of the incarnation as an “impossibility”:

Someone who was fully God and fully man cannot be totally human. This is the root of the Trinitarian problem. It is a sheer impossibility, in biblical terms, to confuse the One God with a human being.[3]

Logic is an indispensable tool for understanding what statements mean and for correlating facts in a meaningful way. However, logic is not competent to determine what is or is not a fact, or to predetermine what might be true. In particular, logic necessarily will run up against limits when we attempt to analyze or understand the nature of the transcendent Creator or how God interacts with the world. We might even put it this way: to expect logic to determine what God can or cannot be or do is illogical.

To assert that God cannot become incarnate, as Buzzard does, is not itself logical. It is a metaphysical claim about what God supposedly cannot do (“metaphysical” in the sense of making judgments about ultimate reality). The doctrine of the incarnation does not “confuse the one God with a human being,” as Buzzard alleges, but rather affirms that the one God has chosen to become fully human. It teaches not that Christ is infinite and finite in the same respect, but that the infinite God deigned to join himself with his finite creation. To assert that this is “a sheer impossibility” is to assert that God could not become incarnate if he wished. Such a stance implicitly denies that “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).

On the other hand, statements about the incarnation might be internally incoherent, in which case logic may be helpful in recognizing the problem (even if not to settle the theological question definitively). Buzzard’s statement quoted above serves as a useful example: “Someone who was fully God and fully man cannot be totally human.” Since “fully man” and “totally human” are identical in meaning, Buzzard’s statement is self-contradictory. We might express Buzzard’s statement symbolically as follows: “Someone who was X and Y cannot be Y.” That proposition is self-contradictory (if someone was Y, then it is false to say he cannot be Y) and therefore illogical. We might attempt to do some damage control on Buzzard’s behalf and suggest that what he means is something like this: “Someone who was fully God cannot also be fully man.” That statement is at least not self-contradictory. Yet now its nakedly metaphysical claim that God could not choose to become incarnate (to be God and fully man) is exposed.

Unitarians delight in pointing out the apparent logical difficulties that arise in affirming that Jesus is God by comparing biblical statements about God with other statements about Jesus. For example, Buzzard states: “The immortal God (1 Tim. 6:16) cannot die. The Son of God died. God cannot be tempted (James 1:13), yet the Son of God was tempted.”[4] The inference to be drawn is that the Son of God, Jesus, cannot be God by nature, since someone who is immortal by definition cannot die and someone who cannot be tempted, well, cannot be tempted.

What all such objections overlook is that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation agrees that God cannot die or be tempted—unless he becomes incarnate. That is, texts such as 1 Timothy 6:16 and James 1:13 are making affirmations about the nature of deity. They are not denying that God could experience temptation or death via human nature if he were to become incarnate (and in fact these texts are not even discussing that question). Thus, without saying so, Buzzard’s objections assume that God could not possibly become incarnate and experience the human condition.

Hypothetically speaking, if God were to become incarnate as a man, we would expect the result to be paradoxical. A paradox is a state of affairs in which two claims seem contradictory—and may even be beyond our ability to harmonize fully—and yet they are both true. Unitarians and other critics of the doctrine of the incarnation presents these “difficulties” as though they are some sort of unexpected trouble for the doctrine. They aren’t. We would predict paradoxes if God did something paradoxical!

A truly biblical Christology must take fully and fairly into account all that Scripture says about Christ, rather than seizing on one set of texts to discount others. Yes, God by nature cannot be tempted, while Jesus was tempted; yet Jesus, unlike all other human beings, never sinned (Heb. 4:15). Yes, God by nature cannot die, while Jesus died; yet Jesus, unlike all other human beings, could not have his life taken away from him (John 10:17–18). Jesus, who was Life (John 11:25–26; 14:6), died. Yes, God by nature is not human (Num. 23:19), while Jesus is a man; yet Jesus is also “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Paradox is not a desperate explanation for a problem with the doctrine, but a pattern in the New Testament teaching about Christ that the doctrine of the incarnation faithfully represents. A bare theism that denies God’s ability to join himself with his creation is an impoverished worldview that is not only unfaithful to Scripture but also undermines both the omnipotence and immanence of God.

Notes

[1] See Anthony F. Buzzard and Charles F. Hunting, The Doctrine of the Trinity: Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound (Lanham, MD: International Scholars Publications, 1998); Anthony F. Buzzard, Jesus Was Not a Trinitarian: A Call to Return to the Creed of Jesus (Morrow, GA: Restoration Fellowship, 2007); Dale Tuggy and Christopher M. Date, Is Jesus Human and Not Divine? A Debate (Apollo, PA: Areopagus Books, 2020).

[2] Buzzard and Hunting, Doctrine of the Trinity, 300.

[3] Buzzard and Hunting, Doctrine of the Trinity, 81–82.

[4] Buzzard, Jesus Was Not a Trinitarian, 419.

— Robert M. Bowman Jr. is the president of the Institute for Religious Research (IRR.org). He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in biblical studies from Fuller Theological Seminary and South Africa Theological Seminary. Dr. Bowman has lectured extensively at Biola University and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary on apologetics, biblical studies, religion, and theology. He is the author or co-author of 18 books, including (with J. Ed Komoszewski) The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense (Kregel, 2024), which discusses the subject of this series in comprehensive detail.

image: modified version of Christ Pantocrator