Every once in a while I tangle with the Oneness Pentecostals. Can’t help it. If you’re a Pentecostal, particularly a Pentecostal on the internet, it’s inevitable.
If you’re not familiar with the Oneness group: Oneness Pentecostals are Pentecostals. Same background, same history, same practices. Significantly different theology. Two things stand out in particular: They believe you must be baptized in the Holy Spirit to be saved (it’s not salvation by grace alone, ergo heresy). And they don’t believe in the trinity; God is One, but not Three (hence the name, and also heresy).
They’re modalists. That is, God’s sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Holy Spirit. Any time you think you’re seeing the Son speak to the Father, it’s just God talking to himself. The trinity is a doctrine the Catholics made up at the Nicene Council, probably because of that polytheist emperor Constantine’s prompting. (Cue the anti-Catholic rhetoric, even though there was no Roman Catholic Church yet for another seven centuries.)
Oneness Pentecostals are kind of like the embarrassing family member who gets into arguments with all your Facebook friends. He’s in the Tea Party, and as far as he’s concerned they’re a bunch of dummies who don’t know or care how “your president,” that socialist Marxist Kenyan Muslim, is destroying the country. Or she’s hopelessly racist, and rips on your Spanish-speaking friends for not speaking English because they dare to use a “Mexican” word. You know who I mean. You’re related to ’em too.
In the case of the Oneness Pentecostals, it’s always, “Hey! A fellow Pentecostal!” Online, they’ll discover my More Christ blog or find me on Twitter. Offline, I’ll be doing something overtly Christian like evangelism, and they’ll catch me doing something more charismatic than usual, and ask a few questions and find out I’m in the tribe.
And then they’ll start criticizing the trinity. Because they figure the only reason I’m still an ignorant trinitarian is I haven’t heard these arguments before.
Dude, I went to seminary. And I didn’t study divinity; I studied theology. That’s right, the hardcore stuff. In which we went over every single one of the anti-trinitarian heresies, and why they violate the scriptures. We didn’t just embrace some Jack Chick, Da Vinci Code-style conspiracy theory about how the devil infiltrated the church and corrupted it with trinitarianism for 15 centuries, till the Jehovah’s Witnesses… whoops, sorry, mix you guys up all the time… Oneness guys showed up to deliver us out of the dark.
Okay, sarcasm over. But I’ve had to deal with the Oneness camp ever since I became a Pentecostal. Ever since before I became a Pentecostal, really. First time I ran into them was at a Walter Martin seminar, hosted by Vaca Valley Christian Life Center in the mid-’80s. Martin, the author of the anti-heresy resource The Kingdom of the Cults, had critiqued the United Pentecostal Church for being anti-trinitarian. So a few of them showed up to debate him. They tried to label him as anti-Pentecostal, which is kind of ridiculous since
But like the JWs, you can’t tell ’em any different. They’re baptized by the Holy Spirit, so they’re right.
I made the mistake of trying to argue with one in school. Oh, I tried. Colossal waste of time. He never stuck to the argument; he was of the debate school of, “Okay, that argument didn’t work. Let’s try this one.” So he’d throw point after point at me, and I’d take each of them apart in turn, and he’d just keep coming up with points, and have me do all the work. It’s like rope-a-dope: Tire your opponent out, then throw a punch when he’s sick of punching back, and declare victory. I suppose it’s how he “won” debates in the past, but after a bit I realized he had nothing but old clichés and started asking him tough questions. Even so: We resolved nothing. Colossal waste of time.
What do you do with a Oneness Pentecostal who’s trying to bait you? Ignore. Dismiss. Makes ’em nuts, but that’s what they’re doing: Trolling. Bullying because they’ve been bullied for being Pentecostal, and for being beyond the pale theologically. To some degree, they’re giving a little back to their fellow Pentecostals. To a smaller degree, they actually think they can maneuver us into an argument they can win—despite the fact they won’t make converts through badgering, but through love. Don’t take the bait.