Nontrinitarianism

Nontrinitarian is a negative label, and the groups it covers agree on almost nothing except what they reject. Sorting them by the ancient heresy each resembles is the clearest way to see how far apart they are.

Jehovah's Witnesses hold that Jehovah alone is God, that Jesus is his first creation, identified with the archangel Michael, through whom everything else was made, and that the holy spirit is God's active force rather than a person. This is structurally what Arius taught in the fourth century, that there was a time when the Son was not, and it is the position the Council of Nicaea in 325 was called to condemn. The Witnesses' New World Translation renders the opening of John's gospel as the Word was a god, a rendering rejected by the great majority of Greek scholars outside the movement.

Latter-day Saints affirm Father, Son and Holy Ghost as three distinct personages united in purpose and will, with the Father and the Son possessing glorified physical bodies. This is not Arianism, since it does not subordinate the Son to creaturely status, and by the classical taxonomy it is a form of tritheism rather than a denial of Christ's divinity. It is coupled with a doctrine of eternal progression that denies the classical distinction between creator and creature altogether.

Oneness Pentecostals, roughly a quarter of Pentecostalism worldwide, take the opposite route: God is one person who has revealed himself successively as Father, Son and Spirit. Jesus is the name of the one God, and Oneness churches baptise in his name alone. This is what the early church condemned as modalism or Sabellianism, and it was rejected because it makes the incarnation and the gospel accounts of Jesus praying to the Father unintelligible.

Historic Unitarianism, emerging in sixteenth-century Poland and Transylvania and later in England and New England, denied Christ's deity outright on rationalist grounds.

The nontrinitarian case is largely negative and largely the same across the groups: the word Trinity does not appear in the Bible, the technical vocabulary of the creeds is Greek philosophy rather than Hebrew revelation, and the doctrine took three centuries and imperial councils to formulate, which suggests development rather than deposit.

Trinitarian theology accepts the historical premise and denies the conclusion. The vocabulary is admittedly later than the texts; the claim is that it was needed to hold together what the texts assert without contradiction: that there is one God, that the Father is God, that Jesus is worshipped and addressed as God and yet prays to the Father as another, and that the Spirit is spoken of in personal terms. The councils, on this account, were not adding to the material but ruling out readings that would sacrifice one part of it. Nicaea in 325 excluded a creaturely Son; Constantinople in 381 extended the same status to the Spirit; and the earlier condemnation of modalism excluded collapsing the three into one actor wearing masks.

For a comparative reader the useful observation is that strict monotheisms find the doctrine hardest. Islam rejects it explicitly, and the Quran's condemnation of saying three appears alongside a denial that God has a son; Islamic polemic has consistently treated the Trinity as a compromise of the oneness of God, and the charge of shirk, association, is the frame in which it is read. Judaism likewise regards it as incompatible with the declaration that the Lord is one, though medieval Jewish thinkers differed on whether Christianity thereby counted as idolatry for gentiles.

Trinitarian Christians reply that the doctrine is precisely an attempt to remain monotheist, and that any account making Father, Son and Spirit into three gods has failed by their own standard as surely as by Islam's or Judaism's. That reply is not accepted by any of the traditions listed above, and the disagreement is genuine rather than verbal.