By Tom Raddatz
1Lord1Faith Publishing
Lancaster, Ohio
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Copyright © 2017 by Tom Raddatz
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Published by 1Lord1Faith Publishing, Lancaster, Ohio
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-9854318-3-9 (paperback), 978-9854318-4-6 (pdf)
Library of Congress Control Number:
Library of Congress Subject Heading: Religion – Doctrinal Theology –
Christology
BISAC Subject Heading: RELIGION / Christian Theology / Christology
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For my daughters.
With special thanks to—
My wife, Deresa, for her invaluable support and spiritual insight.
My editor, Carol Wise, whose help, yet again, has been immeasurable.
Many friends and acquaintances, including but not limited to, J. Dan Gill,
Joe Lake, Chris Makowski, Daniel Santangelo and Bill Williams for their
input and encouragement!
And above all, God the Father, and His Son, Jesus the Anointed One!
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Forward
Tom Raddatz is among those few people who have done one of the most difficult things that we as human beings can do – he has honestly and selflessly reconsidered his own long held beliefs. As a result, he has made important changes in his understanding about God and Christ. With that same selflessness, and with love, he has written this book to his fellow Apostolic believers to encourage them to also sincerely reconsider those same matters.
Tom does not ask people to reassess their understanding based on dreams, visions or other revelations. Rather, he invites them to a reconsideration based on the Bible itself. There is no better way to measure ourselves than to look to the scriptures. Certainly, it is by the scriptures that we can see the accurate picture of what true Apostolic faith should look like: what true Apostolic believers should practice and teach.
Tom assures us that the doctrine of the Trinity does indeed come up short when it is tested against what the apostles taught in the Bible. What may come as a surprise to many is that Tom now believes that Oneness perspectives also fall short. As a longtime advocate and defender of Oneness, Brother Raddatz now tells his fellow Apostolics that there is a better way to understand the great issues about God and Jesus: a way that is more scriptural than either Oneness or the Trinity.
With that in mind, “I Am Not Alone” comes as a welcome opportunity. For all who have had questions about their Trinitarian or Oneness perspectives, and in my experience that is many people, this book brings them another, more scripturally sound way of looking at God and our savior Jesus. Clearly the Trinity and Oneness (as well as Arianism, Adoptionism, and a host of other “isms”) actually present more questions than they solve. Tom walks his readers through the simplicity of the truth and gives them chapter and verse to help them come to a clear view of what our faith ought to be in light of the Bible.
Hence, he takes us through a rather methodic survey of the issues. He carefully addresses the various scriptures that are looked to by those who are of Oneness backgrounds. Tom gives us a fair and honest consideration of those scriptures and asks us the questions: “Have we been looking at these scriptures right?” “Is there a better way to understand these passages?” His answers are illuminating and helpful to any open minded inquiry.
I believe that this book presents both an opportunity and a responsibility for us. We as Apostolics say that our allegiance is to the scriptures. With that in mind, don’t we owe it to ourselves, and to the world we want to reach, to be sure that the faith we hold so dear is pure from all of the insidious traditions of men which have plagued Christianity at large for so many centuries? Apostolics rightly ask the world to turn on the light of scriptural introspection and reconsider their long held beliefs. But we as Apostolics must ourselves always be willing to turn that same light on our own beliefs. We must not ask the world to do what we ourselves are not willing to do.
This book reflects Brother Raddatz’s sincere effort to set before all Oneness believers a reconsideration of the very scriptures upon which we have said that our faith is based. Hence, we find scriptures discussed in this book from Genesis to Revelation and notably from the Acts of the Apostles. Every Apostolic believer should take advantage of this opportunity to test their understanding against the scriptural reasoning that is presented here.
Tom Raddatz is both my friend and a brother in Christ. As Apostolics ourselves, Tom and I did not know one another until recently. We had journeyed on our separate paths. However, by the kindness of God, we had independently arrived at the same important conclusion: We as individuals and as a movement still have farther to go to arrive at the faith of the original Apostolics in the Bible. I join Tom in inviting our fellow Apostolics to go forward with us and join us in that quest for more truth and a better understanding of our faith. This book presents a great opportunity for people to launch reconsiderations. You may not agree with Tom’s view on every point. However, you may very well find yourself agreeing on far more than you would have thought. Perhaps it will be with you as it was with one dear brother who once said to me “I am now understanding things that I have not understood in all of my years as a minister.”
“He who shows me where I err is not my enemy, he is my friend!” If that adage is true, then Tom Raddatz should become the friend of many through this book. Tom invites his readers to introspection and reconsideration of great issues. But he does so only after having set the example of doing that himself. I can say by personal experience that reconsidering our cherished beliefs is a hard thing to do no matter what our religious backgrounds may be. Yet, doing so helps to clear the way for a sounder, more wonderful faith. We can have a faith that is more pleasing to God, more beneficial to ourselves and that makes more sense to the world we seek to reach.
Have the heart of a Berean and “examine the scriptures for yourself” as to whether the things that Tom Raddatz writes in this book are true (Acts 17:10, 11). I believe that carefully reading this book will benefit your grasp of the issues and of the scriptures. I also believe that there are great blessings attached to walking in more scriptural light as God shines it to us. There is greater soundness of faith for those who do. I pray that all who read this book will be so blessed!
J. Dan Gill, Editor in Chief
21st Century Reformation
www.21stcr.org
Introduction
Which of the following views
do you suppose describes a greater God?
Before all creation,
God foresaw and so foreordained, out of billions,
a certain man, whom He claimed as His own Son,
who would overcome all sin,
and live pleasing to God like no other man ever would;
and so, things having come to pass just as He planned,
God glorified and exalted that particular man
above all others…
OR
A God who clothed Himself in humanity,
and did what would have been impossible for him not to do,
and then glorified Himself for doing it!
This book, very simply, is about the profound difference
in these two views.
This book explains why I now believe,
as did the apostles, on the former,
The Great God and His Son, Jesus the Anointed.
–Tom Raddatz
Preface
As the title says, I once was a strong Oneness advocate. For those who don’t know, being “Oneness” is to believe that Jesus is an incarnation of God the Father in the flesh. I wasn’t just an advocate. I used to consider myself somewhat of a champion of Oneness. Around 2004 I felt inspired to seek out the early history of the Trinity dogma, with the idea of defending Oneness against it. I certainly did uncover the origins of the Trinity and how it was adopted and adapted from both pagan philosophy and Gnosticism.
What I didn’t expect to find was that the very ideas and methods that enabled the evolution to the Trinity involved the same philosophical reasoning that caused some trains of thought to evolve into modalistic monarchianism (the ancient term for “Oneness,” or simply “modalism” for short). In other words, I discovered that if I were going to reject the Trinity, then in all good conscience I would also have to reject Modalism on the same grounds. This was not at all what I expected to find in my research.
This book is written to explain, as thoroughly and simply as I can, what I discovered, and why I no longer call or consider myself “Oneness.” I am still very much Pentecostal. I still very much appreciate my Oneness Pentecostal background and still love my Oneness brothers and sisters. I’m not writing to condemn, but to bring others closer to “the knowledge of the Son of God” (Ephesians 4:13). As a Oneness advocate, I had long understood that its heritage was the result of many movements (Protestantism, the holiness movement, Pentecostalism, and baptism in the name of Jesus) away from post-apostolic traditions of men, whose intent was to restore apostolic teachings. It is in this same attitude of restoration of the faith once delivered that has led me to the knowledge of the true Son of God doctrine.
The book that covers my findings on the evolution of the Trinity is titled God is One and Christ is All: Biblical Truth Against the Trinity. The inspiration for this current book was emerging in my thoughts even as I wrote the last one.
My main intention in writing this book is to help us all be direct disciples of Jesus on the topic: who is Christ. This simply means really listening to and hearing what he says about himself. What I discovered and would like to share with you is this: what Jesus clearly says he is, and what is clearly and straightforwardly written in the Bible, is typically something different than what is found in most traditional forms of Christianity, including both Trinitarianism and Modalism. It is simply a biblical fact that nowhere did anyone in the Bible go around openly and clearly preaching either “the Trinity doctrine” or the “Oneness” message. No one in the Bible went around proclaiming, “Jesus is the second person of the Trinity,” any more than they went around saying, “Jesus is the Father incarnated.” But they did clearly preach something in the Bible, and that is what our goal is here: to clarify the Christ they preached and described.
It is my conviction that a biblical teaching should carry the same name as it is called in the Bible. So I was happy to discover that believers of this biblical doctrine call it simply “the Son of God” doctrine. That is exactly what the Bible calls this idea it teaches, that Jesus Christ is the prophesied Son of God. For the sake of full-disclosure, the teaching that we call the “Son of God doctrine” is virtually the same Christology that is also known as “Biblical Unitarianism,” but I am not fond of that title.
There is a secondary purpose here. Since I formerly believed in the “Oneness” view, this work is also a refutation of the Oneness theory . But make no mistake. Embracing the biblical Son of God is not an acceptance of the Trinity by any means; in fact, far from it. This book will show you just how similar Modalism is to the Trinity, rather than to the true and biblical Son of God!
So let me point out a few of the beliefs I haven’t changed by embracing the biblical Son of God teaching. In common with Oneness folks, we “Son of God” believers know the Trinity is a jumped-to conclusion that isn’t clearly stated anywhere in the Bible. Together with Oneness, we also know that the Trinity has lost sight of the Jewish roots and foundational principles of God and Christ. Therefore, and still right along with Oneness, we are convinced that the Trinity is an adding to and taking away from biblical definitions. To make matters even worse, the trinitarian position didn’t just appear out of thin air into the minds of its theologians; rather, it is an adoption of pagan views regarding God, which have been imposed upon the teachings of the Bible and functionally replaces what the Bible does clearly teach about God. These are just some of the many contentions against the Trinity proving it is not a biblical teaching. Certainly, its proponents adamantly believe and claim that it is biblical, but in actuality it is only a derived doctrine. It is derived by interpreting the Bible through pagan ideas, words, and concepts that are not ever spelled out in the Bible. In fact, such adoption of pagan thought is strictly forbidden in the Bible. These things against the Trinity we hold as much as Oneness folks do.
Where we depart from the Oneness view, and what has caused a change of my own heart away from Onenessianism, is that all of these basic issues I’ve just stated the Trinitarians are guilty of also hold true against the Oneness position. Therefore, in this book I will also compare the Oneness interpretational methods with many of the similar faulty ways used by Trinitarians. It is my hope that when Oneness folks see the similarity in methods and sources they and Trinitarians use, then they, like I did, will realize that Oneness/Modalism is no more biblical than the Trinity is.
I personally came to see this view of Christ mainly by doing what I now hope and recommend everyone learns to do: simply listen to what Jesus actually says about himself. The two biggest passages for me were John 5 and 8, and then the Bible as a whole. That open-mindedness to the Scriptures was coupled with researching the historical development of the Trinity. What I discovered along the way were the actual, extrabiblical sources of the Oneness view, right alongside those of the Trinity. It isn’t a big mystery: what happened in either case is simply what the Bible calls being spoiled by philosophy and the traditions of men.
Certainly at this point most Oneness readers will be quite put off at the idea of someone challenging their favorite doctrine about Christ. In fact, Oneness folks will likely respond similarly to how Trinitarians respond to the Oneness message. So let me be clear: I have the same motive as Oneness advocates do when they assert their position against, say, Trinitarians; namely, I am simply responding to a serious and solemn call that is found in the Scriptures:
Beloved, while I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I was constrained to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. (Jude 3)
I have done my homework and spent many years in research, and I can tell you quite assuredly that neither the Trinity nor Modalism is actually the faith that was once delivered by the apostles, or Jesus, or John the Baptist, or any Jew before them. The Trinity doctrine began in the mid-second century, although it was far from the developed form it would come to be in the fourth century; and the Oneness doctrine wasn’t invented until after that, just before the turn of the third century. We know, historically, exactly who first presented each of these dogmas, and it wasn’t the apostles or Christ.
6I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: 7Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. 8But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. 9As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed. (Galatians 1:6–9, KJV)
So, even during the apostle’s times there were teachers trying to pervert the simplicity of the message of Christ. How much more so in these last, most perilous of days? Therefore, let us set aside our emotional responses and come together and reasonably ask, what saith the Scriptures? For the Scriptures are not at all unclear if we would just take heed to the Lord’s admonition that “those who have ears to hear, let them hear.”
Next I want to explain how this book is arranged. The first section will lay the foundations of some simple, yet incontestable biblical rules for interpreting God’s word. The second section will seek to restore and reestablish the simple yet powerful and unshakable Jewish roots of the Messiah (Christ). The third section will present the three greatest stumbling blocks that have effectively blinded both Trinitarian and Oneness theologians to the simplicity of Christ. The fourth section will demonstrate how clearly the apostles of Christ in the New Testament (NT) set forth basic descriptions of Christ that are and were in complete harmony with the Old Testament (OT) views of the Messiah. Having laid the evidence precept upon precept, the book will conclude with the fifth section, which provides direct rebuttals to certain key Oneness “proof texts.” In this way, our topic will have been thoroughly covered.
I will be using an apparently new word that I believe I may have coined for use in this book: “Onenessian.” Whereas “Oneness” is the term for a doctrine, we will use the word “Onenessian” for the adherents of that doctrine. Thus, “Onenessians” will be addressed in the same way as “Trinitarians” are addressed. This is not in any way intended to be disrespectful; rather, it is intended to be more grammatically correct, as is the word “Trinitarian.” This word is also easier than saying “modalistic monarchians” and is intended to be more in line with their self-identity as “Oneness” believers.
I hope and pray that our Oneness readers will allow themselves to receive this biblically stated truth with the same open heart as they hope and expect their Trinitarian neighbors would open their hearts to their message; that is, to search the Scriptures whether these things be so. Any open and honest questions on the subject are wholeheartedly welcome.
Because knowing the truth, our Lord says, can, will, and does set us free.
-Tom Raddatz
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Unless otherwise stated, all scriptural quotes are from the World English Bible version (WEB), which is available on the Internet and is in the public domain. Other versions cited or referenced include: ASV (American Standard Version), CJB (Complete Jewish Bible), ESV (English Standard Version), ITB (Interlinear Transliterated Bible, Biblesoft 2006), JPS (Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1985.) KJV (King James Version), NASB (New American Standard Bible), NASU (New American Standard Updated), NASV (New American Standard Version), NCV (New Century Version), NET (New English Translation), NIV (New International Version), NKJV (New King James Version), NLT (New Living Translation), NRSV (New Revised Standard Version), NWB (Noah Webster’s Bible), RSV (Revised Standard Version), and YLT (Young’s Literal Translation).
Generally, all spelling, punctuation, and capitalization will be maintained as found in the original quotes but won’t necessarily match standards used in the text of this book. However, highlighting herein may have been added to the original.
All links or references to other sources are meant to point to the subject at hand only and are not meant, nor should they be taken, as any type of overall endorsement of those groups, links, or people.
There is considerable controversy over the Tetragrammaton, which is usually transliterated for us as YHWH. Since the exact pronunciation of this name of God is unknown, I will simply reproduce this name everywhere in this book in its transliterated form of YHWH.
Following is a brief glossary to define the key terms of our discussion; namely, “Oneness” and “Trinity,” and the differences between the two.
Oneness means: Jesus is the person of God the Father, who has revealed Himself in human form as Jesus Christ.
* Modalistic Monarchianism (or Modalism) is the most predominant form of “Oneness.” This term means the belief that God reveals Himself through “modes” rather than “persons” (as in the Trinity). Typically, these types of believers will say God was “the Father in creation, the Son in redemption, and the Spirit in sanctification.”
Trinity means: There is one God, who exists in three distinct persons.
There are many variations, of which the following are just a few:
* The predominant view is stated in the formulation: “one substance (ousia) in three persons (hypostasis).”
* Another view is called “Arianism,” which asserts the belief there was a time when the Son was not. To this camp belong all the Trinitarians before Origen, who invented the idea of the eternal generation of the Son.
* There are contentions between major schools of thought whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only, or from the Father and the Son.
Incarnationist means: Trinitarians, Arians and/or Onenessians, who have adopted the pagan idea of God being incarnated as a human in Christ.
Arian means: a view of Jesus that (whether Trinitarian or not) that claims that Jesus literally preexisted his human birth as some form of spiritual entity. The original Arians of the fourth century claimed Jesus was made of “like” substance of God, whereas the opposing Athanasian Trinitarians claimed he was made of the “same substance” as God.
This book argues that none of these views are the original apostolic or biblical view of Christ. While concentrating on correcting the Oneness error with the truth, this book also often touches on the Trinity to show comparisons of how the two positions are arrived at. Ultimately, there are only two types of biblical “interpretation,” Jesus’ method or the devil’s method. By exposing the devil’s method and relying on Jesus’ method, this book contends that we can know the truth of the matter. The truth has been stated and settled in the Scriptures, and indeed, knowing the truth does set free!
