• The author does use the word "person," and explicitly applies it to Jesus, so his issue is clearly not an objection to the word "person" as a term for discussing Jesus' identity: "There is only one person of God and that is the person of Jesus Christ." (p. 110)



• However, we have earlier read this: "The difference is basic: Father and Son are not two persons of God." (p. 71) This is ambiguous. The grammar could mean either that not both are persons or that not both are God, but since he also says in several different ways (e.g. in the quotation given in the item immediately below this one) that "Father" and "Son" both refer to Jesus Christ, it seems somehow we are talking about only one somebody anyway, whatever or whoever he is.



• That kind of reasoning is shown here: "Both Father and Son are titles that refer to Jesus Christ. One title (Father) expresses Jesus' Deity and the other title (Son) expresses the Christ's humanity. The two titles do not relate to the same Being. Father never alludes to humanity and Son never alludes to Deity." (p. 124 - italics mine) In this remarkable and unbelievable passage, the author actually says both "Father" and "Son" refer to Jesus Christ (who remember is one person) - but they don't refer to the same Being! It's hard to know what to make of this, but he does plainly say the Father and the Son are two different Beings - one who is God and another who is not. The Father is clearly the Being who is God, so that means the Son is the Being who is not - meaning Jesus is not God but only man, unless he here uses "Beings" either as a simple synonym for "natures" or as merely referring to the different and temporary states or modes of existence that one person can be in. Is either of these his definition? Or does he use the word "Beings" as conventional, historical theology would use it, more as a synonym for "persons" - beings that have a personal existence of their own distinct from others? We don't know. He never defines his terms. That's probably not what he means, but if he doesn't, then he can't explain how one person can be two "Beings" - one of God and then (at a later time) one of humanity - because he's already laid it down as an unbreakable rule (in his "Preliminary Word," page 5, and in several other places) that "God can't change into a man."
  
  So we have to note that if the author means "being" in one of the former, non-personal senses, he is back to simple modal monarchianism, in which the one person of God, Jesus, is both Father and Son (as well as Holy Spirit) - not only being a changeable God, but also leaving Jesus without anybody to pray to except himself, making his behavior in the Garden of Gethsemane into a very strange charade.
  
  
• These modalistic tendencies are further revealed by the unBiblical way he frequently explicitly speaks of God assuming or taking on merely "a human body" instead of "human nature," apparently in an attempt to avoid the charge of having a changeable God. Examples: "He [God] took upon Himself a human body as a man puts on a coat. God's Holy Spirit dwelt in a body." (p. 65) "...God himself came to earth and clothed Himself in a body, the body of His Son, to manifest His love and to fulfill His plan to save the world from sin." (p. 124)



• 'Jesus said, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). "I" refers to humanity and "Father" refers to Deity. The Father is seen in the Son (John 14:9).' This quotation shows that, in the author's view at this moment at least, the self to which Jesus refers when he says "I" (that is, Jesus' own person) is in fact a person only of humanity, not also of Deity. So Jesus, who is elsewhere said to the "one person in the Godhead," is here revealed in Oneness theology to be a person who is not really God at all.



• The book frequently equates "the human nature" and "the divine nature" with, respectively, the person of Jesus and the person of God the Father without any qualification or explanation. The term "nature" is not defined, but seems to be used as a synonym for "person," a being who exists distinct from other beings and is capable of acting from his own volition. One very clear instance of this is on page 58: "Both natures - divine and human - were active and functioning in the Son in the land of Israel 2000 years ago - not independently but separately. That is to say, each nature performed that activity or function which was proper to it. For example, The Father (Deity) devised the plan of redemption/reconciliation and the Son's (humanity's) job was to carry it out." The author's problem is that if he acknowledges that "nature" is a "synonym for "person," then it makes it obvious he has two persons he is talking about: God, and the person Jesus who is not God, making a shambles of his claim that in his Oneness theology Jesus is God.
  
  It is all extremely confusing. Here in this passage from the book, "God" is obviously a person (the Father) who does things separately from his Son, who is a completely different person, a man. But then we later have to adjust our thinking somehow to see that "God" is merely the nature of deity in Jesus, who is himself the "one person in the Godhead."
  
  This is completely exhausting. Will the real "one person of God" in Oneness theology please stand up and save us from all this confusion?



• Speaking of different persons, is the Son of Man the same person as Jesus Christ? Compare this: "The Son of Man is not God, but God dwelt in Him" (page 71) with this: "...the consumption of bread and wine is a tender appeal to the senses to celebrate the Christ as a human being even though he was also God" (p. 77). It is very confusing to read "Christ was also God" just six pages after reading "The Son of Man is not God." (Also note here there's been a subtle switch of emphasis made in the Lord's Supper from its Biblical meaning of partaking of "the new testament in Christ's blood" (Luke 22:20) which is "shed for many for the remission of sins" (Matt. 26:28) to being a "celebration" of Christ as a human being.)



• The author states Jesus was God only "for a time" - until God left him at his death. (p. 7) But later he says, "God will not lay aside the human nature he assumed. The union of the human and divine natures in Jesus Christ remains in perpetual unity." (p. 78) Very contradictory and therefore every confusing. Did God leave Jesus or not? Also, see the list of "Clarifications" that begin on page 81. They give us this time sequence beginning with Jesus' death:  God left the humanity of Jesus, God raised the humanity, the humanity sits down at the right hand of God, and now the humanity is "in Deity" instead of Deity being in it, but the humanity is NOT omnipresent ("Though a glorified man, He is not omnipresent" - p. 82).
  
  Pardon? How not, if the deity in which it dwells is omnipresent?
  
  This also stands in direct contradiction to page 214: "...because the right hand of God, where the Christ is seated, is everywhere present, the resurrected Christ is everywhere present since, in reality, God has no right side. Presently the Christ is not limited to a body in one particular place."



• "There can be no other person of God to diminish the power and authority and integrity and reputation of the Lord Jesus Christ." (p. 184) No other person of God? But yet on page 20 the author wrote, "Those that belong to Jesus will be resurrected when He comes the second time... Then He will hand over the kingdom He established - life eternal, the final defeat of death - to God the Father." Who is he?

• Concealed anti-Trinitarianism. By pointing out this problem, I'm not saying I think the author harbors personal hostility to ordinary Trinitarian believers; I am saying, however, he clearly does believe that those who preach the Trinitarian view of Christ - in other words, nearly all the pastors, teachers, priests, and theologians in the 2000-year history of the New Testament church - are anti-Christs. He says on page 53 that preaching "God the Son" is "limiting the Son to be God only" and therefore "denying Christ's full humanity." He quotes 2 John 7 as applying in this context, making those who preach that doctrine "deceivers and enemies of Christ." (p. 53) Yet he has introduced his own view of Jesus' nature by saying, "All Christians agree that Jesus Christ, when he walked the earth, was fully God and fully Man." This statement makes it appear the particular view of Christ agreed upon by all Christians in which Christ is fully God and fully man - Jesus as the incarnate Son who existed as a person of God before his human conception and birth - is the one the author is writing in agreement with, when in reality he knows it is precisely this view he rejects and writes against. In my opinion, that's dishonest and deceptive - but it is not too unusual for those who preach Oneness doctrine. They are frequently evasive about the kind of doctrine they preach, using words that would make it appear they don't believe any differently from Trinitarians while in reality holding those who teach the Trinity to be hostile to the true Christ.



• Mischaracterization of the Trinitarian position. Similarly, the author either doesn't know the Trinitarian position he thinks he is writing against or he has set up a straw man to knock down. He writes, "When the Christ, speaking as a Man, says that He is sent from God, it has nothing to do with pre-existence, for humanity does not exist in heaven." (p. 94) And again, "What the Messiah did not mean is that He pre-existed as a Man in heaven before He was born." (p. 99) The problem here is, that's not the Trinitarian position. Our position is not that Jesus existed in the form of humanity before his earthly existence, but that he existed in the form of God, as Philippians 2 says. We don't say Jesus' pre-existence means he was a man in heaven, we say it means he was a person in heaven. There's a difference - one which the author has neglected to notice or "explore" in his look at Jesus' two natures. Personhood does not necessarily mean humanity, as the examples of angels proves - they are persons that are not humans with flesh and blood.
  
  (This doesn't mean, of course, that Trinitarians think Jesus is an angel; it means instead there is no scriptural basis for saying that "person" must be used to mean "person of flesh and blood.")



• Logical fallacies. Spearman writes on page 122:

  God is God the Father.
  Jesus is God.
  Therefore, Jesus is God the Father.
  
  The above syllogism determines that Jesus is the Father.

  But the only reason it does is because it contains a logical fallacy, the fallacy of equivocation, in which different senses of the same word are exploited in order to come to a false or misleading conclusion. In this case, the author uses the word "God" in a different sense in his minor premise than the way he used it in his major premise, and therefore his conclusion doesn't necessarily follow. It again shows his confusion between "nature" and "person." He hasn't defined his own terms accurately enough to realize that in the way he states the major premise, the word "God" is used to refer to a person; but in the way he states the minor premise, it is being used in a different way, to refer to Jesus' nature of deity (as well as being applied to another person, a distinction the author cannot admit because of his theology).
  
  And, by the way, here's another syllogism using the same kind of logic:

  Mary is the mother of Jesus.
  Jesus is God.
  Therefore, Mary is the mother of God.

  I would be interested in hearing Spearman discuss this one. For myself, the way he stumbles around with words and with logic brings me back to the nature of Biblical theology, and to why one must pay attention to the way words are used in different parts of Scripture, always being careful to define and to specify how one is using words to represent the doctrine taught by Scripture. Scripture - its overall teaching - must always remain the foundation, not logical deductions made from definitions based only on how a word is used in some parts, but not all parts, of scripture.



• Who is Jesus now? It is very unclear from this book whether Jesus is man or God or both now, in heaven: "The Son of Man was no longer a human being with vital functions and an animated human nature after His death and resurrection. Now He is restored a vivifying Spirit in heaven with the power of imparting life to sick and dying human beings." (p. 210) But remember that elsewhere we have been told that "Spirit" is Deity, not humanity, and the two can never change into each other. Again, the author states something that flatly contradicts what he says elsewhere, but never offers a satisfactory explanation.



• Confusion about the Spirit.
Having mentioned what the author says about "Spirit," I will also say that there is some other strange, inconsistent, and confusing stuff surrounding it or Him or whatever exactly "the Spirit" is in Oneness theology. Since the Holy Spirit isn't the main focus of either the book or this review, I will not pursue the topic in detail, but will say I think the oddness of the views expressed about it stems from the same source as the book's other errors: refusing to recognize that the Bible teaches a distinction between eternal persons in the Godhead. The author doesn't know, or doesn't want to admit, that the Spirit is not a "nature" of the Father or of Jesus - he's a person distinct from them both. Here's an example of what I mean: the author says that "God" and "Spirit" are simply synonymous, but he also writes that the Spirit left the world at the time of man's fall (p. 148) only to come back at Pentecost (p. 171). This would have left us without God, or at least without God's spiritual work on earth, for almost the entire Old Testament period, but that's certainly not the way the Bible pictures things.


• A preference for paraphrased Bible versions. Though he also quotes from the NASB and KJV translations, the author shows a marked preference for quotations from paraphrased Bibles such as the Amplified Version and The Message, especially the latter, which is extremely free in its treatment of the Biblical text and turns it into a horrible modern American patois. That is exactly what one should avoid like the plague if one is presenting oneself as a credible guide to the Bible's theology - because that requires precision about what the Bible actually says on the topic at hand - but the author is oblivious.


An example of how his use of paraphrased Bible versions is linked to confusion in his doctrine is on page 177. Spearman is writing about "the Spirit of Jesus" and, after quoting Acts 1:11 says this, "It was not Jesus' body that would come back, His Spirit would come back ten days later at Pentecost." (p. 177). The quotation used of Acts 1:11 is from The Message version, which reads, "You Galileans! - why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly - and mysteriously - as he left."

The KJV reads, "...Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." - that is, personally and bodily, not by his Spirit; but the language in The Message's version of the passage makes that very ambiguous, and only with that ambiguity can Spearman make it refer to the Spirit coming down at Pentecost, which is another strange and unexplained departure from more traditional interpretations of the verse.


• "Torture stake" instead of "cross?" Once, in referring to Philippians 2:8 that says Jesus "became obedient to death on a cross," Spearman uses the term "torture stake" to replace "cross." (p. 29) It is well known in theological circles that this is a hobby-horse of the Jehovah Witnesses, who insist that Jesus was not hung on a cross to die but on a straight pole, and that the word "cross" should not be used because of its supposedly pagan origins and connotations. Spearman does not explain his reasoning for following their practice here, and elsewhere he does use the word "cross," but the single appearance of this JW convention in his book is very jarring. In a book that purports to be a guide to "what all Christians have agreed upon" in regard to Jesus' identity as both man and God, why would he go within a hundred miles of a term, however incidental to his main theme, that is associated with a cultic agenda?

Christianity has experienced a number of organizational changes since its beginnings. Starting with the original disciples it began to develop into an institutional body. First came the papacy, Roman Catholicism, and religious councils in the middle ages. Second came Martin Luther, Protestantism, and the revelation of God's grace. Then in the twentieth century, Pentecostalism was born again after two thousand years.

Pentecostalism celebrates the descent of Jesus Christ's Holy Spirit into the world. Pentecostalism reveals new truths about the Man Christ Jesus...

• One which may be for the better, depending upon how you look at it, is that, as I've already mentioned, its confrontation of Trinitarian theology is much less direct. I don't think the term "Trinity" is once mentioned. At the Chapel, at least in the UROG classes themselves (if not generally in the way the pastor and the members of the Chapel liked to talk to the Christian public), the "errors of Trinitarianism" were explicitly named and dwelt upon at length. Here, the confrontation with historical Christian theology is rarely made explicit and is not dwelt upon when it is mentioned - it's confined mainly to reminders that "God the Son" is not a term found in the Bible.



• The statement "The only person in the Godhead is Jesus" was never made at the Chapel and would have never been made. Instead I remember it being explicitly referred to as erroneous. It was held up as an example of how the older UPC "Jesus Only" theology was deficient - it demonstrated a slip into a clearly indefensible modalism.



• Likewise, the Chapel's teachers would have never made the statement that the Father "assumed a human body" in coming to dwell in Jesus - that again would be a recognizable modalistic error that the Chapel identified as a way of thinking to avoid. But this book, as I've previously noted, often states, sometimes with qualification, sometimes without, that what happened in the incarnation was that God assumed a human body.



• Two bad word studies stand out as blatant errors the Chapel's Bible college rightly did not allow its students to make:
  • "YHWH is pronounced Jehovah." (p. 113)  The Chapel at least taught a correct, detailed, and historically informative account of the relationship between the Hebrew word "Yahweh" and the English word "Jehovah." Spearman, for some reason, reverts back to a simplistic and misleading account.
  • "Sent" means "begotten."  In every place in the book where Spearman has to quote a Bible verse in which Jesus describes himself as "sent" from heaven by the Father, he places the word "begot" in square brackets immediately after the word "sent." He defends this practice on page 124 by saying, "When the New Testament speaks of the Father 'sending' the Son into the world it is an allegorical statement meaning that it has a hidden spiritual meaning that transcends the literal sense of the text." In reality, this is an indefensible manipulation of the Biblical text to get around a meaning that flatly contradicts the author's own theological idea about what the verse should say. By contrast, the Chapel never taught that "sending" meant "begetting," or that any verse had hidden, spiritual meanings that "transcend" the literal text; and it never would have resorted to inserting a word into a quoted Bible verse that gives the true "hidden spiritual meaning" of a word that appears on the face of it to have a much different connotation.



• The Chapel wouldn't have used paraphrased versions in a theological work, or in any of its teaching or literature for that matter. It designated the KJV as the version to be used in its teaching, not because it was of the "KJV-Only" school, but because the KJV is a fairly good translation of the Greek and Hebrew, and because it was the version most conservative, Pentecostal Christians were most comfortable with at that time. The Chapel, to its credit, valued accuracy in translation very highly and wouldn't have tolerated the free, jargon-like rendering of The Message, especially not in a study presented as Biblical doctrine.