We Believe in One God

The affirmation that God is One has always been a part of Christian doctrine, from the words of Jesus himself, through the time of the Apostles, the time of the Church Fathers, the Reformation, and the great revivals, to the present. The only matter to determine is who exactly this One God is.

Who is the One God? Nobody in today’s Church seems able to answer that question. The disagreement among Christians regarding who God is is a blight on today’s Church. But the reason why we have arrived at this deplorable state is because we let theologians steal the discussion from us.

Theologian thieves laid claim to something that does not rightfully belong to them: the Truth of One God. We need to take it back. The few of us who are successful will do so by returning to the Bible, and avoiding the traps of theology going forward.

The Nicene Creed

The debate about who the One God is only started around 400 AD. The first four centuries of Christian doctrine, and the 2,500 years of Jewish faith which preceded them, were strictly monotheistic. The Nicene Creed (penned in 325 AD) demonstrates this. It concisely asserts: “We believe in One God, the Father Almighty.” That's right: One God, the Father!

The update to the Nicene Creed was penned in 381 AD at the First Council of Constantinople, saying the same thing. It stated that the One God is the Father. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, written by the bishops in attendance, begins with the words "We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible." Once again, the first affirmation of faith was monotheistic, naming the Father as the One God.

The point is that Christians for 400 years did not only know that the One God is the Father, they also professed it. Indeed, their profession of faith in the One God and Father was the first thing on their lips. When they made their profession of Faith, they started with "We believe in One God, the Father."

The authors of the Nicene Creed were bishops who came from every corner of the Roman Empire to meet in the city of Nicaea (modern-day Turkey) at what is called the First Ecumenical Council. Of the approximately 300 Church leaders in attendance, only two refused to sign the Creed--but they had no disagreement with the statement that the One God is the Father.

The reason why two of the 300 bishops did not ratify the Creed was because of their disagreement with the statement that Jesus the "same substance” [Greek homo-ousios] as the Father. They wanted a more precise definition of the nature of Christ. They wanted the Creed to say that Jesus had a similar nature [homo-iousios] to the One God. Notice the one-letter difference in the Greek words—just one i.

The bishops who attended the Council of Nicaea had disagreements, but not over the question of who God is. About monotheism they were in perfect agreement. The One God of the Nicene bishops was the Father.

Questions Missed

Although the debate over Christ’s nature was won by the proponents of “the same substance” [homoousios] group. That was good because the truth is that the resurrected Christ indeed has the same divine nature as the Father. However, the bishops of that age failed to address the key questions of how and when Jesus got his divine nature. In other words, they did not shed any light on these two questions:

1. How did Jesus get the divine nature?

2. When did Jesus get the divine nature?

If the pastors at Nicaea had worked harder to get an answer to these two questions, they would have prevented one of the greatest tragedies of Christianity: the hijacking of Christian truth by theologians in the years following the Council of Nicaea. This hijacking is the main cause of the confusion about who God is today. The errors committed after Nicaea dominate Church to this day.

Thieves in the House of God

The men who ended up defining who God is were men who had one foot in the Church and the other in the world of philosophers. Let's call them theologians, but in reality, they were thieves. We're calling them "theologian thieves" because they stole the light of monotheism from the Church. The Truth rightly belongs to the Church, but theologians stole it from us.

... the House of God, which is the Church of the Living God, the pillar and ground of the Truth (1 Timothy 3:15; KJV).

These theologians deviated from what Church Fathers established at Nicaea with an approach Christians never should have taken: framing their ideas in the vocabulary of Greek philosophy rather than in the vocabulary of the Scriptures. Inventing supposedly Christian "doctrine" from the astute philosophizing of men.

... they worship me in vain, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men (Matthew 15:9; LEB).

They exalted the words of Plato and Aristotle over the Word of God. They exalted themselves, and turned the simple Truth of One God and Father into a complexity of theological gibberish. They claim stewardship of certain Greek words, words that supposedly reveal who God is, but they knew him not.

Do not follow them!