Biblical versus Trinitarian Meanings of Bible Terms

Because trinitarian doctrine has changed the meanings of key terms in the Bible, it is important for us to clarify the mean­ings of some of these terms right from the start or else it would be im­poss­ible for us to under­stand what the Bible teaches. We now look at the terms God, Lord, Father, Jesus, and Son of God. These will be discussed only briefly, just enough to highlight­ the points of depart­ure between the Biblical and the trinitarian mean­ings of these terms.

Right from the start we need to consider the central person of the Bible: God. By “God” trinitarians mean the Trinity—a God consisting of three per­sons who share one substance. Yet neither the concept of a divine sub­stance (which comes from Greek thinking and poly­theistic faiths) nor that of a tripartite God whose three persons share one sub­stance, exists in the Bible. The one and only God of the Bible is called “Yahweh,” a name which occurs some 7,000 times in the Scriptures. In striking con­trast, the trinitar­ian God has no name at all! Even if some trinita­rians equate Yahweh with God the Father, the fact remains that this God the Father is only one of three persons in the “Godhead”.

It is universally admitted by trinitarians (consult any Bible dictionary or systematic theology) that the word “trinity” does not exist in the Bible. In any case, “trinity” is not a name but a descriptive term for a non-existent tripartite God (non-existent, that is, in terms of its being absent from the Bible). The tri­partite aspect of trinitarianism has given rise to the situa­tion in which some Christians pray to the Father, others pray to Jesus, and yet others, especially those from charisma­tic circles, pray to the Spirit.

But Yahweh is one Person, not three, and He definitely has a name. Yet for all intents and purposes, that Name has been obli­terated in Christen­dom. Most Christians don’t know who Yahweh is, though they may have heard of Jehovah, an inaccurate form of the Name which they associate with a group called the Jehovah’s Wit­nesses, leaving them with neg­ative feelings towards the name Jehovah and by extension Yahweh. The name Yahweh has been tossed out (except in academia) despite the fact that it occurs on almost every page of the Hebrew Bible (which Christians call the Old Testament), in fact six or seven times per page on average.

The New Testament, like the Old Testament, is strictly mono­theistic, a fact that is known to all biblical scholars. But because true monotheism is incongruous with trinitarian­ism, trin­itarians try to get around this by chang­ing the meaning of “God” such that God is “one substance” or “one essence” rather than one person despite the absence of the term “one sub­stance” (or its concept) in the Bible.

The gradual suppression of God’s personal name, Yahweh, had its begin­nings among the post-exilic Jews (those who lived after the return from the Babylonian exile) who felt that it was reverent to refer to Yahweh not as Yahweh but as Adonai (Hebrew for “Lord” or “my Lord”). Most crucial­ly, the practice of not uttering the name Yahweh was soon reflected in what was being done in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint (from septuaginta, Latin for seventy), often short­ened to LXX, the Roman numerals for 70, since accord­ing to tradition the translation was done by 70 or 72 translators. The LXX is not a “transla­tion by committee” as we might understand that term today, but a collect­ion of disparate transla­tions done over a period of two centuries and was completed a century or so before Christ.

Most significantly, the LXX renders “Yahweh” as kyrios (Lord), the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Adonai (Lord). In other words, God’s unique personal name, Yahweh, was replaced with a descriptive title, “the Lord” (kyrios, a word that is also applied to human beings).

Despite this misrendering of “Yahweh,” the Greek-speaking Jews had the benefit of know­ing that kyrios in many contexts refers to Yahweh, the credit for which could be given to their Jewish religious heritage. But the same could not be said of the non-Jews (the Gentiles) because most of them don’t know that kyrios (Lord) is often simply a substitute for “Yahweh”. [1]

Because of the Gentile ignorance of this fact, within three centuries after the time of Jesus, the title “Lord” as applied to God was conflated with the title “Lord” as applied to Jesus, who was by then declared to be “God the Son,” a trinitarian title found nowhere in the Scriptures. By as early as the mid-second century, by which time the Gentile churches had become predomi­nantly non-Jewish, the name “Yahweh” had prac­tically disap­peared from the church.

Significantly, with the elimination of the name Yahweh, the church en­tered into a state of spiritual decline that con­tinues to this day. In the fourth cen­tury, the Roman emperor Constant­ine made himself the de facto head of the Christian church with the politi­cal objective of stabi­lizing his empire. This further hastened the spiritual decline of the church; and not long after that, the Pope of Christen­dom was functioning like a Roman emperor. The church was being steadily absorbed by the world.

The elimination of the name Yahweh began with the post-exilic refusal to pronounce it for fear of unintentionally mis­using it, notably by violat­ing the third commandment (“You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain”). In the end, no one could be exactly sure how the Name (YHWH) was orig­in­ally pronounced, though the authorita­tive 22-volume Encyclopedia Judaica says that the original pronun­ciation was “Yahweh” and that it has never been lost.

Ultimately does it matter today how His name was exactly pro­nounced? Doesn’t God look into our hearts to see if we genu­ine­ly call upon Him and His name? Even if we knew how YHWH was originally pronounced, would we know with cer­tainty where the stress was placed, on the first syllable or the second? (The stress is almost certainly placed on the first syllable because “Yah” is the short form of “Yahweh,” hence YAHweh is more probable than YahWEH.)

The near elimination of Yahweh’s name has given trinitar­ian­ism an opportunity to establish its errors. These errors will wilt and die if we restore His Name. And indeed the Scriptures say that the name of Yahweh is to be proclaimed, not suppressed:

The Jewish reluctance to utter the name “Yahweh” explains why it is not used in the New Testament. The New Testa­ment was written for the Jews in the first instance. Since they held back from utter­ing God’s name, they would have shunned any evan­gelist who spoke it, and this would have shut the door on evangelism. The churches that Paul wrote to were com­posed main­ly of Jewish believers though some of the churches had sizable Gentile minor­ities. And since Paul ad­hered to the principle of preach­ing the gospel “to the Jews first,” he would never risk turning the Jews away from the gos­pel by uttering Yahweh’s name. In any case, the reluct­ance to utter Yahweh’s name was not a serious problem in practice because the Jews knew that the title “Lord” in many contexts refers to Yahweh.

When the gospels and the New Testament letters were being written some 150 years after the LXX had been completed, the LXX had by then become entrenched and widely circu­lated in the Greek-speaking world. The Greek language itself had become the lingua franca or universal lang­uage of the Roman world, espec­ially in com­merce, in much the same way as English has become the language of inter­nation­al com­merce today. That is why the New Testa­ment writers would usually cite Old Testament passages not from the Hebrew Bible but from the LXX, the Greek transla­tion of the Hebrew Bible. It is only natural for the New Testament, which has come to us in Greek, to cite Scripture from the Greek LXX.

The word kyrios (Lord) in the LXX verses which are quoted in the New Testament refers to Yahweh in most instances. That Yahweh is called “Lord” in the LXX (and in the New Testa­ment passages which quote the LXX) was not a source of confusion to the early Jewish believer, for he was aware of the referential equivalence of YHWH and “Lord”. At the same time, he also knew that “Lord” is a broad term that may refer to persons other than Yahweh. When Peter told the multit­udes in Jerusalem that God had ap­pointed Jesus “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36)—that is, Jesus was ex­alted as Lord Jesus Christ at his resurrection—the Jewish believers did not con­fuse “Lord” as applied to Jesus and “Lord” as applied to Yahweh God.

But the situation changed for the worse when the New Testament writ­ings fell into the hands of the Gentiles, for they were un­able to distin­guish “Lord” as applied to Yahweh and “Lord” as applied to Jesus. This conflat­ion and confusion suited trinita­rianism perfect­ly, and facili­tated its rise in the early centuries of the Gentile church.

In the New Testament, “Lord” may refer to Yahweh, to Jesus, to ei­ther Yahweh or Jesus, or to a dignitary. This variability in mean­ing is not the re­sult of any careless or deliber­ate confusion of persons, but arose from the fact that in the work of salvation, Jesus funct­ions in perfect unity with Yahweh his Father who accom­plishes mankind’s salva­tion in and through Jesus. In the work of salvation, God and Jesus cannot be sepa­rated. That is why in many in­stances we don’t need to look for sharp distinct­ions in the use of “Lord”. For example, “the Lord” may refer to God or to Jesus in verses such as 1Cor.16:7 (“if the Lord per­mits”), 1Cor.16:10 (“do­ing the work of the Lord”), and Phil.4:4 (“Rejoice in the Lord”).

On the other hand, there are many instances of “the Lord” that make a clear distinction between God and Jesus, for example, 1Cor.6:14, “And God raised the Lord,” where “the Lord” can only refer to Jesus. The dis­tinction be­tween God and the Lord Jesus is often established by an explicit reference to them as separate persons, e.g., “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom.1:7; 1Cor.1:3; 2Cor.1:2; Gal.1:3; Eph.1:2; Phil.1:2; 2Th.1:2; Phlm.1:3).

Sometimes it is not immediately clear who “the Lord” re­fers to, but an examination of the text would usually clear up the un­cer­tainty, as is the case with “the Lord of glory” in the following:

Who does “the Lord of glory” refer to? Since Jesus is not men­tioned in the preceding verse (v.7) or the following verse (v.9), and since God is men­tioned in both verses, do we take “Lord of glory” as a reference to God, as many have done? Yet a careful examination shows that “the Lord of glory” refers to Jesus, not to God, because:

1. In v.2, Paul speaks of “Jesus Christ” as the one who was “cruci­fied,” a word that is used also in v.8. Hence context alone con­firms that “the Lord of glory” in v.8 refers to Jesus.
2. James 2:1 speaks of “Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory”.
3. Since God is immortal (Rom.1:23; 1Tim.1:17) and can­not die, “the Lord of glory” can only refer to Jesus, who is mortal and has died for mankind.

Any of these points would be sufficient to establish that “the Lord of glory” in 1Cor.2:8 refers to Jesus, yet we bring up all three to show that it is not difficult to find out who “the Lord” refers to if we are willing to go through the proper exege­tical procedure.

In the church today, “Lord” is used indiscriminately of God and of Jesus in a way that conflates the two. This serves the ob­ject­ives of trinita­rianism because trinitarians do not want to make a distinct­ion between God and Jesus. In trinita­rian churches, referring to Jesus as Lord is tanta­mount to saying that he is God. But not so in the New Testa­ment. Addressing Jesus as “Lord” is to acknow­ledge him as the master of our lives; it is not an assertion of his deity.

The New Testament, notably in Paul’s letters, often makes an intention­al dis­tinct­ion between “God” and “Lord”. James D.G. Dunn mentions a crucial fact that is unlikely to go well with trinitarians:

Today there is the further problem that “Lord” has be­come an archaic word that is no longer in everyday use, having been replaced by words such as chief, boss, CEO, and so on.

Because of the conflating use of “Lord” in the church today, this title will be used sparingly in this book until we come to our study of the New Testament application of “Lord” to Jesus.

My book Totally Committed! [2] expounded Deuteronomy 6:5 (“You shall love the Lord [Yahweh] your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might”) from a trin­itarian perspective, replacing Yahweh with Jesus as the object of commit­ment. I now realize that this is a ser­ious error, indeed a serious sin, but like Paul I can only plead that I did it in ignor­ance and on those grounds hope to re­ceive mercy (1Tim.1:13). Many thousands all over the world have read the book or received its teaching as a Bible course. I can only hope that they will have the chance to hear the mess­age of the present work.

The Israelites regarded Yahweh God as their Father as seen in verses such as Isaiah 63:16 (“You, O Yahweh, are our Father”) and 64:8 (“Yahweh, you are our Father”). In the Old Testament, nine persons are named Abijah, which means, “my Father is Yah(weh)” (Yah is the short form of Yahweh).

But to trinitarians, the Father is only the first person of the Trinity. Just as “Father” is not a proper name but a term that defines one’s relationship to his own son, so in trinita­rianism, God the Father has no name but is defined in relation to the second person, God the Son, who iron­ically does have a name. His name “Jesus” is a very human name which was com­mon in Israel in New Testament times.

Trinitarians say that Jesus is “not just” a man but the God-man, as if Jesus is demeaned when we say that he is true man. In trini­tarian dogma, no one other than Jesus, not even God the Father or God the Spirit, is God-man. This leaves Jesus in a category all of his own.

The trinitarian assertion that Jesus is fully God and fully man ultim­ately means that he is neither truly God nor truly man. It is simply impos­sible for anyone to be 100% God and 100% man at the same time. When we make Jesus 100% God and 100% man, we are fabricating a non-existent person to suit our doc­trines, doing this without regard for reality or common logic, and coming up with state­ments which are pat­ently false, non­sen­sical, and unbibli­cal. False­hood may sound convincing enough to deceive people but that doesn’t make it true. False gods are worshipped in many religions but that doesn’t make them true.

There is a subtle, and for this reason dangerous, implic­ation in the God-man doctrine: Are we making Jesus more than God? In trinita­rianism, God the Father is “only” God whereas Jesus is God + man. We cannot discount man as having zero value with nothing that can be added to God. In fact, man is the apex and crown of God’s creat­ion—a creation that was deemed to be “very good” in God’s eyes (Gen.1:31).

Even if we insist that man is worth nothing, the fact remains that a per­son who is both God and man would be far more appealing and at­tractive to us human beings than one who is “only” God. It is psycholog­ically easier for us to relate to someone who is human than to one who is not. This goes a long way towards explaining the great appeal of the trinitarian “God-man” construct of Jesus and its power of deception.

It is the human element that accounts for the strong appeal of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to the Catholics who worship her. Whereas the Jesus of trin­itarianism is vested with divin­ity and human­ity, Mary is entirely human and for that reason would be more appealing than Jesus to many Catholics. Her appeal is strength­ened by her status in Catholicism as “the Mother of God,” making her power of persuasion before God unsur­passed in the eyes of her devot­ees. It is not surprising that statues of Mary are found in most Catholic churches, and that many churches are dedi­cated to her, such as the cathedral in Montreal called “Mary, Queen of the World”. The fact that Mary is “merely” human and not divine does not deter her devotees from adoring and even worship­ping her.

But if we go with the biblical view that Jesus is a true man, a 100% man, it will elicit the trinitarian protest that we are reducing Jesus to a “mere” man. But every human being on the face of the earth is “mere” man or woman, yet was created in “the image of God”. As for Jesus the “mere” man, it has so pleased Yahweh the Most High God to exalt him above the heavens and to seat him at His right hand, making Jesus second only to Yahweh in the universe. Jesus is thus “crowned with glory and honor” (Heb.2:7). But how can the trinitarian Jesus ever be crowned with—i.e., conferred with—glory and honor when as God he has always had this glory from all eternity?

Finally, what does the title “Son of God” mean to most Christ­ians? As good trinitar­ians we stressed the word “God,” so we read “Son of God” as “God the Son”. Our eyes saw “Son of God” but our trinitarian minds were trained to see it as “God the Son”. The fact that our intelli­gent and edu­cated minds could so easily reverse the words back to front, is a fearsome dem­on­stration of the power of error.

The fact that trinitarians feel compelled to reverse “Son of God” into the unbiblical “God the Son” is an indication that they might not be confi­dent that they can defend “Son of God” as a divine title; for if “Son of God” is truly a divine title beyond any shadow of doubt, there would be no need for anyone to reverse it as “God the Son” in the first place.

In fact some trinitarians reject the claim that “Son of God” is inherently a divine title, even when it refers to Christ. For example, James Stalker, a trinitarian, after examining the various meanings of “Son of God” in the Bible, goes on to say, “When the title has such a range of application, it is obvious that the Divinity of Christ cannot be inferred from the mere fact that it is applied to Him” (ISBE, first edition, Son of God, The).

But even if we clarified this error regarding “Son of God,” most Christ­ians still would not know what “Son of God” means in the Bible. The title “Son of God” as applied to Jesus sim­ply affirms that Jesus is the Messiah or the Christ, the one anointed by God (Messiah is the Hebrew term and Christ is the Greek term for “the Anointed One”). This basic fact is acknow­ledged by many trin­itarian references, e.g., West­minster Theo­logical Word­book of the Bible, which says that “Son of God is a synonym for Messiah”. It goes on to give examples of this equivalence such as Peter’s con­fession of Christ as the Son of God (Mt.16:16) and the centurion’s similar confess­ion in Mk.15:39 which “should be under­stood as an acknowledg­ment of Jesus’ messiahship” (p.478).

The titles “Son of God” and “Christ” (Messiah) are found in juxtaposit­ion for exam­ple in Mt.26:63 in which the high priest says to Jesus, “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God.”

Jesus kept silent before the presiding judges who wanted him to say something self-incriminating; hence the high priest invoked the name of “the living God” to compel Jesus to say under oath whether he was the Christ, the Son of God. It would be ludicrous to conclude that the high priest was really trying to force Jesus to admit that he was “God the Son,” not only because the actual term used by the high priest was not “God the Son” but “Son of God,” but also because the Jewish people as a whole had never believed that the Messiah (the Christ) is God. In fact the Jews thought that the thor­oughly human John the Baptist could be the Christ (Lk.3:15). But in typical trinitar­ian fashion, we read into the high priest’s words some­thing that he would never have thought of ask­ing, namely, whe­ther Jesus was the divine God the Son, the second person of the Trinity.

The juxtaposition of Christ and Son of God is also found in John 20:31:

John is asking his readers to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, these two titles being equivalent. The title “Son of God” is equivalent to “Messiah” (mashiah, מָשִׁיחַ), Yahweh’s anointed King and the Savior of Israel and of the world. In donning our trinita­rian specta­cles, we read John as if he were asking us to believe that Jesus is God the Son. On the contrary, John does not ask us to believe that Jesus is God but that he is the Messiah. The Old Testament ref­erences to the Messiah do not indi­cate that he is divine. The Jews as a whole have never expected a divine Messiah.[3] N.T. Wright says something along the same line.[4]

The two equivalent titles, Christ and Son of God, appear together several times in the gos­pels. In addition to the verses already cited, we have the following (all from ESV):

In the New Testament, “Christ” (Messiah) and “Son of God” often ap­pear togeth­er as synonymous titles. That is be­cause the two titles refer to one and the same person in Psalm 2, which is the Old Testament basis for the equiv­a­lence. We now quote Psalm 2 in full because of its importance. Note the constant reference to the Messiah (the anointed King) or to the Son of God:

Verse 7 speaks of Yahweh’s Son (“You are my Son; today I have begot­ten you”); this is the key verse that establishes the messianic aspect of “Son of God”. And since the Messiah is the Anointed One, therefore verse 2 (“his Anointed”) and verse 6 (“my King”) refer to the Messiah-King whom God has established on “Zion, my holy hill” from which the Mess­iah will reign, not only over Israel but over all the nations to the “ends of the earth” (v.8). The Messiah will come in Yahweh’s name as Yahweh’s repres­ent­ative, and it is through him that the people will “serve Yahweh with fear” (v.11). The final verse (v.12) has yet another refer­ence to the Son: “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry… Blessed are all who take refuge in him”. Kiss­ing a king expresses reverence and submission.

The New Testament likewise says that Christ (the Mess­iah) comes in God’s name: “I come in my Father’s name” (John 5:43) and “the works that I do in my Father’s name” (10:25).

The Son of God, the final heir to the Davidic throne, will be King not only over Israel but over all the nations of the earth. It is to this exalted posi­tion, the highest in all the earth, that Jesus the Messiah has been appointed by Yahweh. The Messiah will govern the nations of the earth—an earth in which Yahweh’s name will be known to all its inhabitants. Christ will repre­sent Yahweh in the admin­istration of every matter in inter­national affairs, usher­ing peace on earth and creating good will among men, as announced long ago by the angels at his birth.

For many centuries the Jews have been looking with eager expect­ation to the coming of the glorious Messiah, the One who will liberate them from the oppression they had endured under Gentile nations for much of their his­tory. More than that, their Messiah will be like Moses who will teach them Yahweh’s truth, and guide them in the ways of Yahweh God.

The challenge for the Jews is that they have no easy way of identi­fy­ing the Messiah when he comes, for their Scriptures do not teach them to ex­pect the arrival of a divine man but the arrival of “a prophet like me,” that is, a prophet like Moses: “Yahweh your God will raise up a prophet like me” (Dt.18:15, NJB; quoted by Stephen in Acts 7:37).