Pattern Christology and Pattern Theology explore the relationship between angels and humans, including a claim that Jesus once had an angelic nature known as the Angel of the LORD. Pattern christology doesn’t rise and fall on this premise; the more important point is that Jesus had a created nature of some kind prior to the incarnation. But viewing the Angel of the LORD as a literal angel (who is also truly divine) has some benefits of harmonization that are worth defending.

The primary push-back against this view is that the book of Hebrews postures Jesus as superior to angels. In that context, the author makes sweeping statements about the secondary role that angels play in God’s creation, some of which seem to refute the idea of equality or interplay between the races of angelkind and mankind.

To understand how Hebrews relates to this issue, we need to look at the argument being made. Hebrews 1 endeavors to show Jesus’ supremacy over two groups, the prophets and the angels. These groups are related, because the prophets would get their messages from angelic sources (2:2).

To establish that Jesus is superior to angels and prophets, the author appeals to two aspects of Christ’s history – his creation and upholding of the universe, and his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension to the throne of God in Heaven. The former is an appeal to his divine nature, which is supreme over all by nature. The latter is an appeal to his human nature, which became supreme over time though his obedience. On this point of temporal supremacy, the author writes,

After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. (Heb 1:3b-4)

Jesus owns the universe as its divine creator, and he inherited the universe from the Father as a man who laid down his life to save it. That inheritance happened at a point in time, at the ascension, when the degree of authority he possessed as a man flipped from being less than an angel, to more. The author continues this point in the next chapter.

For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere, “What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. (Heb 2:5-9)

The original psalm (Psa 8) asks the question “what is man” in reference, it seems, to the race generally. But the author of Hebrews’ use of the psalm focuses it prophetically on the chief man, Jesus, who ascended over all dominion and authority. So it isn’t that every human has the same authority as Jesus. We are coheirs as his bride, but we receive derivative authority over portions of his inheritance, not authority over the whole thing (cf. Mat 19:28).

So the supremacy that the author of Hebrews assigns to Jesus is not a racial supremacy of mankind over angels. It’s the supremacy of a single man over every other creature in creation, angel and human alike. The author focuses on angels because this is what the Hebrews were turning to in their turning from Jesus – worship of angels, elevation of prophetic scriptures of the old testament without the one they pointed to, etc. But his argument gives Jesus authority and supremacy over all the rest of mankind as well, both as a function of his deity, and as a function of his unique propitiation as a man, and his consequent human ascension to the throne of God.

So yes, the author postures Jesus against angels, and places them under subjection to him. But this does not rule out a prior angelic nature, or claims about an image-bearing relationship that links angels and humans. Jesus’ ascension over the angels was a product of his incarnation, death, and resurrection, not his nature.

Furthermore, we know that even Christians don’t stay human in the sense of exclusively descending from Adam. We probably retain that lineage, as Christ does in the resurrection. But per 1Co 15, we become more than descendants of the man of dust; we also bear the image of the man from heaven. So if there is a racial superiority in view, then we have to acknowledge that it’s a racial superiority of the resurrected man over the angels, and the resurrected man is more than a descendant of Adam. On my view, where Christ formerly had an angelic nature, and gave that up for a human nature, his final resurrected nature would be a union of both (cf. Rev 21:1-2). There must be something heavenly about his original and current nature for Paul’s words to have any meaning, so either there is now a third line of image-bearers, or Jesus is the protype for a union of the previous two lines of angel and human.

This would suggest that in the resurrection, angels have a change in nature as well. There’s reason to believe that they’re involved in our resurrection/rapture/ascension (Mat 24:31, Rev 14:14-20). Perhaps they too receive a new united nature at that point, to match our own. This would defeat any nitpicking about Hebrews, because just as we become more than mankind, angels become more than angelkind. We all become like Christ, after his new image that merges both lines.

In any case, the argumentation in Hebrews is focused on a specific problem, and the statements made by the author have a limited scope that references the superiority of a single man. His argument is unconcerned with racial equality or differences between angels and humans in their final state, and shouldn’t be taken to speak to that issue.

The pattern offers a powerful argument against the trinity in its evaluation of the sonship of Christ. Whereas most arguments against the trinity leverage individual prooftexts where cracks in the doctrine can be seen, the pattern’s main argument examines a large body of biblical evidence concerning the sonship of Christ, and makes the case that the Son is best understood as Jesus’ human nature relating to God as his Father, rather than God the Son relating to God the Father. Without denying that Jesus is truly God and truly man, patternists argue that scripture is most cleanly harmonized when we recognize that Jesus is a son of God in the same way that Christians are sons of God, according to our human nature. This allows him to be truly regarded as our brother and co-heir, because his sonship flows from his humanity rather than his divinity.

When this case is received and accepted in its full force by trinitarians, most will appeal to a dual sonship concept to rescue “God the Son” from being wholly replaced by “the son of God” in our understanding of Jesus. Simply put, the thesis is that yes — Jesus does have a human sonship toward God as his Father — but according to his divine nature he is still rightly understood as God the Son incarnated within the son of God. Thus we have two sonship relationships in view in the person of Christ, that of an eternal begetting of God the Son from God the Father within the godhead, as well as an in-time begetting of Jesus as a human son of God.

Rescue devices like the dual sonship hypothesis are an important part of building systematic knowledge about a subject. For example, some will challenge the integrity of the gospels’ account of Jesus casting demons out of a man and into a herd of pigs. There are questions about the geography of where this happened (supposed contradictions), as well as a difference in the number of demon-possessed people impacted. For someone who believes that the gospel accounts are reliable, a need therefore arises for a rescue device that will allow all seemingly contradictory passages to be harmonized together. When it is shown that the original view can be reasonably harmonized with information that challenges it, the original view is able to withstand its challenge. Otherwise, it needs to be resolved by another method, such as presenting an alternative understanding of the passages, rejecting the inerrancy of scripture, or rejecting the inclusion of the passage in scripture due to manuscript issues, etc. Often an appeal to ignorance is also viable, where we don’t know a good resolution, but can show that the challenge isn’t a true contradiction, just a mystery.

As we work to build and rebuild knowledge in the face of challenges to existing systems of thought, we therefore need to understand how to evaluate rescue devices in their merits and their limitations. There are three basic questions to ask.

1. Is this rescue device possible? Given everything we know about the subject at hand and its surrounding context, are we able to hold this hypothesis without contradiction? For the Christian whose authority is the Bible, this involves ensuring that the rescue device does not contradict other biblical texts.
2. Is this rescue device likely? There can be a gray area in biblical interpretation where we compare multiple hypotheses that are all possible, and evaluate which is the most likely. This gives us guidance for drawing tentative conclusions while allowing us to revisit the matter when other unforeseen evidence presents itself.
3. Is this rescue device evidenced? The most powerful form of rescue device is one which has additional supporting evidence that establishes it as the most likely alternative. Things that are true tend to leave evidence in the world around us, so building knowledge about the world tends to involve moving toward those explanations that are not only possible, but which also arise from the body of evidence we have.

An example of this dynamic on the patternist side came when a trinitarian pointed out that John 17 shows evidence of a preincarnate sonship for Jesus. If Jesus’ sonship comes through his humanity, then how could he be the son of God before he was incarnated as a man?

This challenge is legitimate, and it forces a patternist to either forfeit his view of the sonship of Christ, or come up with a rescue device to explain Jesus’ preincarnate sonship. The best answer we have is that the Angel of the Lord referenced throughout the Old Testament served as a real, created nature for Jesus’ divine nature, such that this “preincarnate hypostatic union” could be rightly called the Son of God according to his created nature. The reason that this rescue device is so powerful is that not only is it possible, there is also substantial evidence throughout scripture to suggest that it is actually the true way of understanding Jesus’ preincarnate form.

In the same way, trinitarians are equally free to develop rescue devices to the patternist challenge that scripture teaches a human sonship for Christ, rather than seeing Jesus’ divine nature as God the Son. A berean’s task then is to evaluate such rescue devices to determine if they’re A) possible, B) probable, and C) evidenced by anything in the Bible.

Perhaps the strongest case for retaining divine sonship would be the idea that human sonship may be patterned off of it. In terms of Christian philosophy, one can argue that everything in the world needs to trace back to God in terms of its design and meaning. The fact that humans are in the image of God (Gen 1:26-27) is the culmination of God’s work to examine his own nature, and create an entity in the world that is completely based off of that image. Lesser aspects of the world then reflect only a fragment of God’s nature, such as the laws of logic reflecting the way God thinks, or moral laws reflecting the way God feels, etc. Human sonship therefore should trace somehow to a fragment of the nature of God, and the trinitarian belief in God the Son fulfills that expectation. Simply put, humans have children because the concept of child-bearing exists in the very nature of God.

Against this, it can be pointed out that the typological relationship doesn’t fit very well. God designed humanity to bear children as two persons who come together to produce an image-bearer together. The trinity has one person (the Father) eternally begetting God the Son, with a third person (the Holy Spirit) off on the side with no apparent role in the matter. A trinitarian might rescue the rescue hypothesis by arguing that the Spirit could serve as the second person who unites with the Father to beget the Son, but we have no biblical evidence that this is the case, and generally trinitarians seem to view the Spirit as being submitted to both the Father and the Son, in terms of authority in the godhead, which would go against a mothering role.

The issue of names in the godhead is also worth pointing out. Father and Son are related concepts, whereas Word and Spirit (Breath) are distinctly related concepts (i.e. related to each-other, but not to the Father and the Son). In trinitarian language, the second person of the trinity is named both God the Son and God the Word, joining him to either the Father or the Spirit conceptually, depending on which nomenclature is in view. The fact that there no unified nomenclature that conceptually joins all three persons of the trinity together is unusual. We’d expect to see the Spirit represented as God the Mother if human sonship were patterned after some kind of divine generation within the godhead.

To be fair, patternists do view the Spirit as the image after which woman is patterned, just as men are patterned after the Word, without demanding God the Mother terminology. Patternists have a bipartite godhead of Word and Spirit that unites to be the God and Father of Christ, Adam, and Christians. My point here is simply that words and breath are conceptually related ideas, allowing the patternist godhead to make sense in terms of the meaning ascribed to each of its members. The trinitarian godhead has disjointed meaning, such that there is no unifying concept that explains how or why these persons unite together. If creation is based off of the godhead, and man in particular is created in his image and likeness, then we should see the three persons of the godhead reflected in his image-bearers. Trinitarian theology struggles in this area, so basing human sonship off of divine sonship is problematic on account of that struggle.

As for the patternist alternative, one could argue that sonship comes out of God’s nature through the creative impulse that he possesses. If God is the only ultimate category of thought, and God chooses to express what he knows about himself through creation, then one would expect him to create someone in his own image and likeness as the culmination of his creative work. Sonship then is merely the culmination of creativity, man and wife knowing each-other and producing children from that union.

As I stated earlier, I think that viewing God the Son as the source of human sonship is actually a strong aspect of the trinitarian rescue device of dual sonship for Christ. If my only problem with it was quibbling about the names and interactions of the divine persons, I would consider the rescue device to be adequate enough to maintain the trinity as a viable model of the godhead, even if I thought it was less adequate than the pattern.

However, the dual sonship view suffers greatly on an exegetical level in two ways.

1. There is no clear evidence that I’m aware of which indicates that scripture sees Jesus as possessing two sonship relationships with God or a divine person. This is a completely ad-hoc rescue device which may be possible, but for which we have no biblical evidence.
2. Viewing scripture through a lens of dual sonship creates a very practical interpretive problem, in that it becomes difficult or impossible in many cases to know which form of sonship is in view in a particular passage.

Concerning the first point, Wayne Grudem is a formidable theologian and advocate for the trinity whose views and arguments on the subject can be considered representative. When he argued for dual sonship in his Systematic Theology, he used a single verse of scripture which we can assume is the best verse he knows of to support the idea. Grudem writes,

Although Jesus does call us his “brothers” (Heb. 2:12 NIV) and he is therefore in one sense our older brother in God’s family (cf. Heb. 2:14), and can be called “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29), he is nevertheless careful to make a clear distinction between the way in which God is our heavenly Father and the way in which he relates to God the Father. He says to Mary Magdalene, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father to my God and your God” (John 20:17), thus making a clear distinction between the far greater and eternal sense in which God is his Father, and the sense in which God is our Father.

— Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, chapter 37

John 20:17 is a verse that I regularly use to indicate that Jesus and his Christian brethren actually do have the same Father and God, not different fathers, or different senses of fatherhood. I don’t lean heavily on the verse because I’m aware of how Grudem takes it, and I have plenty of other scriptures that argue the patternist case. But it is telling that the one verse I’m aware of that trinitarians use to establish dual sonship for Christ is a verse that may be equally (or better) interpreted to make the opposite case. So I state again that there is no verse in the Bible that I’m aware of which clearly teaches dual sonship.

When you take John 20:17 in context rather than just prooftexting it in isolation, it becomes difficult to make the case that Jesus here is “careful to make a clear distinction” between God the Father and God as our heavenly Father, the God whose image we bear.

1. Jesus isn’t presenting doctrine to his disciples in any kind of a teaching role. He is asking Mary to alert his disciples about his pending ascension and (by implication) his victorious resurrection. It is strange that such a crucial interpretive key which impacts so many of his teachings would be given to someone who wasn’t even part of the twelve, long after so many teachings about his relationship with the Father have already passed, in an off-handed comment rather than a formal gathering for rabbinic instruction. He isn’t being “careful” to relay this crucial instruction, at least.
2. Jesus has just completed the very cornerstone of his work to abolish sin and death, and reconcile man to God. Given this context of restoring man to God, is it more likely that he is drawing a precise theological distinction between two senses of sonship, or that he is exulting in the fact that his Father is now also the Father of the disciples, on account of his completed work of reconciliation? One can quibble that Jesus often called God the Father of the disciples prior to the resurrection, but the point is that Jesus’ death and resurrection is the event which made it all possible. Without Christ’s work on the cross, we would all be children of Satan, whether we lived before or after that moment in history (Jhn 8:41-44). So it is far more likely that Jesus is exulting in the great work that he accomplished on the cross, to reconcile God’s estranged children back into a relationship with him. Far from separating his relationship with the Father from our own, Jesus is rejoicing that they are one and the same through his finished work on the cross.

Without any alternative verses that demonstrate a distinction between Jesus’ relationship with the Father and our own, I think it is fair and generous to allow John 20:17 to be neutral on the subject, and say that at best trinitarians have no verse that establishes dual sonship. A less generous (though likely accurate) view would be to say that John 20:17 actually argues against dual sonship, when taken in context.

At this point it’s well enough established that the dual sonship hypothesis is a possible rescue device for trinitarian christology, but it is an ad-hoc (unevidenced) view that may or may not be likely. When we look at how the dual sonship view impacts hermeneutics (Bible interpretation) it should move the rescue device into the “highly unlikely” category. Large numbers of scriptures become difficult to interpret because it is unclear whether the author is speaking of the divine sonship of Christ, or his human sonship. If dual sonship is accurate, then the authors of scripture come across as deeply negligent in their communication of crucial information, failing to disambiguate between the two sonships in every moment that the relationship between Jesus and the Father comes up. Furthermore, even if trinitarians could shoehorn a verse like John 20:17 to provide such disambiguation, there should be disambiguation statements all over the text of scripture, in the same way that the common names “Simon,” “Judas,” and “Mary” etc. are frequently disambiguated with clarifying information. Yet scripture regularly speaks of Jesus’ sonship toward the Father as if we should just know which sonship is in view.

A concordance search for the word “Son” in the New Testament yields plenty of places where the ambiguity of dual sonship creates two viable interpretations of a verse. Here are just a few that I found in preparation for this article.

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. (Rom 8:29)

The “firstborn among many brothers” statement pushes this verse toward human sonship as the likely interpretive grid, but the verse can be fairly interpreted with God the Son serving as the source of the image to which we are conformed, if God the Son is a real entity in the backdrop of the biblical authors’ worldview. Gen 1:26-27 has us bearing the image of God in our creation, so it creates expectation for a divine source of our new image in Christ. Yet Gen 5:1-3 and 1Co 15:47-49 has us bearing the image of at least one created being (Adam), so it could be equally interpreted as our bearing the image of Christ in his resurrected human nature. The question of which nature provides Jesus with his sonship in this passage therefore greatly impacts our interpretation and integration of the verse with the rest of our theology, and no disambiguating phrase is given by Paul to help us understand his meaning. Paul frequently clarifies himself in his arguments, thinking about the perspectives and potential objections of his readers, yet here it’s almost as if he doesn’t see anything that needs to be clarified in the sonship of Christ.

No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known. (Jhn 1:18)

Even taken in its broader context, there is no clear indication of which sonship is in view in this passage, if the dual sonship hypothesis is accurate. Concerning divine sonship, trinitarians will often take this in a metaphysical sense, placing God the Son at God the Father’s side (metaphorically) as the person in the godhead responsible for revealing God to his creation. This means that Jesus’ manifestation through the Angel of the Lord and his incarnation as a man are instances of God the Son revealing the invisible Father to creation. Both God the Father and God the Son are outside of creation and intrinsically invisible to creation, but the Son is particularly tasked with revealing the invisible God to creation.

Daniel 7 pushes against such an interpretation, with Daniel at least being a man who saw the Father, given that both the Father and the Son were distinguishable in that passage. This would mean that something other than metaphysical invisibility is in play in the hiding of the Father, and a viable alternative would be to interpret this as ethical separation rather than metaphysical separation. The general theology of what happened in Eden, with man being banished from the presence of God, makes an equally viable (if not better) interpretation. Man is unable to see God on account of his sin, not his metaphysical distinction from the creator, and Jesus is the ethically perfect, human mediator through whom we are able to be reconciled to God, and thereby see him again (cf. Isaiah 6:1-7).

Regardless, while I think the human sonship / human mediation view better harmonizes with the rest of scripture, both divine and human sonship would be viable interpretations of John 1:18 if the dual sonship hypothesis were accurate. Yet we are given no indication in the text which form of sonship is being examined. One would expect there to be disambiguation between God the Son and the Son of God in John 1 of all places, if dual sonship were in the backdrop of John’s thinking. As it stands, John doesn’t seem to care about clarifying which sonship is in view, either here or in the rest of his gospel or letters.

And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Mat 3:16-17)

Trinitarians reference the baptism of Jesus a lot, because it is one of the few places where all three persons of the alleged trinity interact together, as compared to the more common interactions between the Father and the Son apart from the Spirit. If there were no viable interpretation of the verse that used a human sonship for Christ, then the rescue device would have no problem in this particular passage; it would obviously be referring to Jesus’ divine sonship. However, a viable interpretation using human sonship does exist, meaning that here too we have a problem because no indicator is given by the author to help us understand which sonship is in view.

This ambiguity alters the theological impact of the verse by making it either about the nature of God, or about the nature of salvation, depending on which form of sonship is in view. Here again, espousing a dual sonship view has a substantive impact on our ability to understand the meaning of a passage.

These three passages are given as a sample of the impact that dual sonship has on our ability to understand the Bible, but there are many more for those willing to sift through the myriad of scriptures that reference the sonship of Christ toward the Father. Conceding human sonship while attempting to retain divine sonship as an interpretive option does violence to biblical interpretation, to the extent that it becomes prohibitively unlikely that the authors of scripture believed in a dual sonship for Christ.

Trinitarians should stop straddling the fence as they grapple with the force of patternist arguments concerning the human sonship of Jesus toward God. Either Jesus experiences a divine sonship as God the Son, or he experiences a human sonship as the Son of God. Both conclusions cannot be reasonably seen as arising together from the text of scripture.

While a dual sonship for Christ may be logically possible as a rescue device for trinitarian theology, it is prohibitively unlikely when we try to interpret the Bible through that grid. Whereas the patternist rescue device for Jesus’ preincarnate sonship is evidenced in scripture and harmonizes the Bible well, the trinitarian rescue device for Jesus’ human sonship is unevidenced in scripture and it makes Bible interpretation prohibitively difficult. If scripture gives evidence of Jesus sharing with his brethren a human relationship toward God as his Father, then this is biblically incompatible with the idea that he also possesses a unique Father/Son relationship within the trinity. Simply put, God the Son cannot coexist with the Son of God in the Bible that the apostles handed to us.

Acknowledging human sonship for Jesus does not mean that his true divinity is compromised. It simply means that Jesus’ divine nature should be called something other than “The Son,” and that he possesses a human relationship with God as his father, rather than a divine relationship between two persons within the godhead. If Jesus is a human son of God, then trinitarians need to do the hard work of reevaluating what that means for their theological system, rather than patch it up with a rescue device that doesn’t ultimately work.

For those who do somehow view dual sonship as viable, the ambiguity that it introduces into biblical interpretation should lead them to be gracious toward those who interpret the Bible differently. Trinitarians regularly speak and behave as if their view is inescapably obvious as the only possible conclusion of the Bible, such that they can label those who disagree as categorically outside of the Christian faith. Whatever other problems may exist in such a posture, one certainly has no justification for it when relying on a theological framework that is as scripture-obscuring as the hypothesis of dual sonship. The trinity is not an obvious conclusion of the Bible, and the ambiguity introduced by dual sonship makes it even more understandable that honest students of the word would come to a variety of conclusions about what it teaches about Christ and the godhead.

So while I would argue that God the Son and the Son of God cannot coexist in the pages of scripture, trinitarians and patternists should be able to coexist in the body of Christ through the same kind of good faith debate and discussion that we see between calvinists and arminians concerning the nature of salvation, or dispensationalists and covenantalists in the framing of redemptive history. All of these are theological systems that represent man’s best attempt to understand what the Bible is teaching on a subject, and all bring to the text the same fallible human reasoning that makes knowledge building a cyclical process in all human disciplines. May we never come under the rebuke that Jesus gave to the Pharisees and scribes when they elevated their own tradition to a point of practical inerrancy.

So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.'” (Mat 15:6b-9)

The trinity is not scripture, nor is it an essential part of the Christian faith. It is a fallible system of theology that needs to be treated as such.

When I reflect on the discussions I’ve had over the years about the trinity, with its various doctrinal merits and deficiencies, I am often reminded of two complementary Jane Austin novels, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. In the former work, Austin explores the engagement of two very stubborn characters as they grapple with their own pride and prejudice in the search for truth about the other. In her latter work, Austin addresses the opposite temper, one which is too easily persuaded from conviction. A sense of the struggle between the stubborn and the relenting comes out in the following excerpt from Persuasion, involving an event where a stubborn young girl found herself in a sick bed after refusing to yield to another stubborn man’s advice.

Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now, to question the justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character; and whether it might not strike him that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have its proportions and limits. She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.

While I disagree with Austin’s general view of human character (that all virtues are kept virtuous through balance and proportion), she nevertheless shines as a masterful observer of the underlying dynamics that so often shape and override our surface dialogues and disagreements. For my part, I have rarely seen these three dynamics of pride and prejudice and persuasion more fully expressed in the Church than in the discussion and debate over the trinity and its rival viewpoints.

Thus while most of this site is devoted to reasoning logically and biblically with trinitarians, it seems necessary to also address these underlying dynamics that rise up in all of us, when they turn sinful and hinder the genuine pursuit of truth.

The first time that I was ever sanctioned by trinitarians came when I was in college. I had been appointed to a position of leadership in my Christian fellowship quite accidentally, due to a miscommunication, so it wasn’t a particular injustice when I lost that position over my views — I shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But it was still a very public disgrace, so I remember it well.

The end result was that I was accused of pride (“arrogance”) for believing that I might be right where the rest of the Church historically and today has been wrong. Of course I would later find that the issue of church consensus is much more complex than one man contra mundum, but as a Protestant I had made a commitment to follow scripture wherever it leads, regardless of consensus, so I left confused as to why consensus had any relevance to the truthfulness of the claims I was making.

This experience together with many others helped me to recognize the degree of prejudice that trinitarians often bring into their discussions. What I found over the years is that trinitarians regularly come to a conversation,

1. Assuming that their own view is wholly accurate and without fault, and
2. Assuming that all major alternative views have already been discovered and refuted.

Rather than pursue truth and a clearer understanding of scripture, it seems that the task for the (already inerrant) trinitarian is to identify which stock error is being defended by his friend, and then to disabuse him of that error. I’ve been accused of arianism more times than I can recall (including in the above discussion), not because my view actually has anything to do with arianism, but because trinitarians are simply trying to classify me within their existing rubric so that they can know how to respond. Such discussion becomes less about understanding scripture in context, and more about making pre-canned arguments from pre-canned categories of thought.

Of course, the problem of prejudice cuts both ways. First, the bad faith and bad form discussion tactics that are often employed by trinitarians are common, but they are not universal. There are plenty of good, gracious, and intellectually responsible trinitarians out in the world, and we need to treat one another on a case-by-case basis, not according to stereotypes. Furthermore, non-trinitarians with grievances against the trinitarian camp will often treat their opponents with their own form of prejudice, returning evil for evil, and that is certainly not the behavior that Christ exemplifies and teaches (1Pe 3:8-9). Pride and prejudice in persuasion are human problems, not just trinitarian problems, and we all need to guard against expressing them in our debates with each-other.

The prejudice that plagues discussions about the godhead leads to a breakdown of communication, in that it creates a barrier to deeply understanding the opposing point of view. For example, the final straw in the conversation that got me kicked out of my college leadership team came through the following question and answer:

Leader: Do you believe that the Son is a created being?

Me (thinking for a bit): Well yeah, of course I do.

Anyone who’s accustomed to viewing the Bible through trinitarian lenses will of course understand why such a statement would get me kicked off of the leadership team of a Christian fellowship. I was young and inexperienced, so I didn’t understand the impact that the arian controversy had on Christian categories of thought, even to our own day. When I affirmed that the Son was a created being, my leader understood that to mean that I denied the true divinity of Jesus in the same way that Arius did, by making Jesus’ divine nature an entity that was created by the Father, rather than an entity eternally proceeding from the Father.

But the claim that I had attempted to defend before receiving that question was that Jesus’ sonship is a property of his human nature, rather than his divine nature. In other words, it is inappropriate to call Jesus’ divine nature “the Son” on its own; rather Jesus’ sonship comes through his incarnation as a man (more or less). So I understood the question in the following way:

Leader: Do you believe that Jesus has a created nature?

Me (thinking for a bit): Well yeah, of course I do.

That’s just orthodox christology to my ears. Because of the incarnation, it’s appropriate to say that the Son is a created being. It’s equally appropriate to say that the Son is an uncreated being. He is both truly God and truly man. This duality of meaning that we see in a single question and answer reflects a broader breakdown of communication between trinitarians and other schools of thoughts. It is very easy to speak past one another, bringing to the text and the conversation a deep set of presuppositions that prejudices our interpretation of the Bible and each-other.

Living as a theological black sheep who still loves trinitarians and the broader body of Christ forces me to cultivate a practice of “listening from the ground up” whenever I encounter views of the Bible (or of other matters) that are foreign to my own way of thinking. This essentially involves finding a point of common ground underneath the disagreement (usually the authority of scripture), then rebuilding in my own mind the reasoning that my friend uses to reach his different conclusions.

The value of this practice is that it helps one to understand the root cause of the disagreement, and to clarify areas where one or both sides needs to improve its view. Perfect consensus is rarely achieved in any case, due to the subtle influences of pride and prejudice and persuasion by things other than the text (like creeds and the ever-coveted stamp of orthodoxy). But for the truth-seeker, the exercise is an invaluable way to prune bad ideas in one’s own thinking, and strengthen the good.

Perhaps the most fruitful conversation I’ve ever had on the trinity came when a very patient friend listened to my view from the ground up, and challenged me in two legitimate areas. I believe it was the first time anyone ever brought a legitimate criticism against my view, rather than a straw man. And it happened because he actually took the time to rightly understand my line of reasoning, from the ground up, and to deal with the problems that he found along the way. He saw the following two flaws:

1. Associating Christ’s sonship with his human nature cannot explain the preincarnate sonship that Jesus had with the Father.
2. My treatment of Jesus’ sonship had me speaking like a nestorian, separating Christ into two persons (a human and a divine) rather than uniting him as one.

My friend had his own quite severe form of heresy in his own view, being a defender of orthodoxy while unaware that he himself was quite unorthodox. So if I cared only about winning the argument, I could focus all of my rhetoric on that error and ignore my own issues. But someone who genuinely wants to know the truth of what the Bible teaches needs to set aside his pride and his prejudice toward being right (confirmation bias), and be willing to be persuaded by a good critique when it comes.

In the end, these valid critiques drove me back to scripture, and helped me to develop a stronger and more robust system of the godhead that can make a better stand against trinitarian thought. This is how we grow, listening to the critiques of others, and working to understand them from the ground up. Patternists can and should learn from trinitarian critiques, and trinitarians should likewise foster a greater willingness in their own camp to listen and learn from those who have valid challenges against the trinitarian system.

As Anne Elliot points out, there can be great value in a persuadable temper. There can also be great danger. Christians should not be easily tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine (Eph 4:14), but neither should we be so stubborn as to resist valid correction. Where Austin views balance as the guide to mediate these two extremes, consistent Christians should measure all things by the word of God, and be stubborn or persuadable insofar as a doctrine aligns with or chafes against it. As one friend of mine put it (though unnuanced by the evident need for apologetics), “When I open my Bible, I open my mind. When I close my Bible, I close my mind.”

For the Christian, humility does not mean that we forgo strength of assurance or conviction. Rather, it means that we submit to God as our authority, then build and rebuild our convictions around his word alone.

The introduction to John 1 is often used by trinitarians as a prooftext that supports their view of the godhead, and that refutes the views of various cults. It’s true that the cults have difficulty with this passage, but it’s also true that trinitarians should consider it a problem passage for their view, rather than a support.

The full argument in this regard is discussed in the article, Jesus the Firstborn of Creation, so I won’t elaborate too much here. But the essential point is that trinitarians change the meaning of “God” (theos) from “God the Father” to “the divine essence shared by all the persons” in the span of a single sentence. They need “God” in John 1 to refer to God the Father, to distinguish his personhood from that of God the Word/Son. But applying that definition consistently to the whole verse forces it to break the trinitarian formulation of the Godhead, which claims that the Son is not the Father. Consider the following injection of their more preferred terminology of Father and Son:

In the beginning was the Son, and the Son was with the Father, and the Son was the Father. (Jhn 1:1)

Trinitarian theology uses this verse to show a difference between the Father and the Son in the first part, and they accomplish this by interpreting “God” as God the Father, who was with (and therefore distinct from) the Son. But the second half of the verse equates the two, forcing trinitarians to equivocate on the definition of “God” to now refer to the divine essence shared by all the persons of the Godhead, rather than the Father. The Word was with “the Father” (theos) and the Word was “divine” (theos).

Because the cults also suffer from John 1, they don’t generally force trinitarians to be consistent in their interpretation of this verse. But it truly should be seen as a problem passage for the trinity, rather than a support.

Because Patternists do believe in a plurality of persons in the godhead, we wouldn’t be challenged by John 1 even if the trinitarian rendering were accurate. But our recognition of a preincarnate hypostatic union allows John 1 to be interpreted according to the nature of Christ rather than the nature of God, since the hypostatic union fits the merging and separating of persons more naturally than plurality within the godhead. Consider the following rendering:

In the beginning was Christ, and Christ was with God, and Christ was God.

When we view the term “Christ” here to refer to a union of Jesus’ divine and human natures, it’s appropriate to speak of Jesus in the incarnation as being both distinct from God, and God himself. We see this in many places in the gospels, some of which I’ve listed in article linked above.

The problem of course is that God became man long after creation, only 2,000 years ago. But if we show that the union of God and creature can be pushed back to the point of creation, then John 1 can be speaking of a preincarnate hypostatic union, rather than plurality of persons within the Godhead. To accomplish this, patternists appeal to Jesus’ old testament appearances through the Angel of the LORD, who was both with Yahweh God, and who was Yahweh God.

As elegant as the Angel of the LORD is in explaining the Word of John 1, Trinitarians have a response to this kind of reasoning, taken from historic interactions with Arianism. Like Pattern Christology, Arius claimed that the Son is a created being, but he did this without appealing to a hypostatic union of divine and creaturely natures. Thus Arianism turned Jesus into a demigod, rather than a union of God and man, and is rightly refuted by trinitarians.

However, as part of this refutation, some trinitarians will argue that if the Word of John 1 created all things, then the Word himself cannot be a created being. So if patternists make the “Word” of this passage refer to Jesus’ preincarnate created nature, the Angel of the Lord, then along with Arianism this means that something created had to create “all things,” which would be a self-contradicting statement.

This of course is a very wooden use of the term “all” in scripture. All does not always mean all, in the sense that there are no exceptions to the general universality implied. We do this “all” the time in English, and New Testament Greek offers plenty of its own examples. Consider this sampling of non-universal uses of “all” from John’s gospel alone:

• “And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness–look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him.” (Jhn 3:26) Here the sense of “all” is clearly meant to refer to a general trend rather than a universal set of all people. John’s disciples who were speaking were clearly exceptions, and most likely there were other scatterings of people who did not go out to Jesus.
• “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” (Jhn 4:29) The conversation we have recorded between Jesus and the woman at the well does not contain every activity ever done by the woman, nor is it likely that the full conversation did either. The point of concern seems to be all of the men she had ever been with, or all of the significant points of shame in her life. In any case, the phrase “all I ever did” is limited in its meaning by the context of her words.
• “[Peter] said to him, ‘Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my sheep.'” (Jhn 21:17) Here Peter acknowledges Jesus’ divine omniscience, but fails to acknowledge the limits and exceptions to this omniscience which came with his union to a human nature (e.g. Mar 13:32). Here we have a strong sense of the term “all,” but with known exceptions.
• “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.” (Jhn 3:35) This too is a strong, highly universal use of the term “all.” Yet even Jesus’ authority has an exception, one that Paul calls out in his own explicit refutation of a wooden overapplication of “all.” We will look at this in detail in the next section.

In light of these examples, is it reasonable to infer from John 1 that Jesus’ creation of all things necessarily rules out his own prior creation? Or is it possible that there is an exception to this general statement, strong as it is?

Notably, patternists do not even need an exception for the alternative view of John 1 to work. Given Jesus’ divine nature, it is entirely appropriate to speak of Jesus creating himself as the firstborn of creation, in the same way that Jesus is credited as resurrecting himself (John 2:19). Because Jesus is truly God and truly a creature, the strong statement in John 1 can be taken without any exception by simply appealing to Jesus’ self-creation of his angelic nature.

Nevertheless, to push back against an excessively wooden use of language, let’s take a look at the appropriateness of refusing exceptions to a strong and universal use of the word “all.”

It’s amazing to realize that Paul actually, explicitly dealt with this very issue of misusing the word “all” in his first letter to the Corinthians. Usually we go to Paul for deep insights into theology and the Old Testament, but apparently the wooden use of biblical language was as much of an issue in his day as it is in our own, such that he had to address it in his writings. He argues,

For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “all things are put in subjection,” it is plain that he is excepted who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all. (1Co 15:27-28)

In his argument for the supremacy of Christ over all creation, Paul initially uses an imprecise shorthand for the concept by simply stating that “all things” were placed under him. But recognizing that some people might include God in “all things,” he nuances his use of “all” to say that of course God is the exception. Jesus is the king who God appointed over all things to be his vice-regent (Psa 2). Therefore God retains the highest authority, and Jesus rules under him, from his throne in Heaven.

So is it fair to expect human language to always list out and defend exceptions like this, when they are not germane to the point being made by the author? No, of course not. The same nuanced statement of Paul is made in John without nuance or exception (Jhn 3:31, 35). As readers, we are expected to use our brains to apply a passage according to the evident purpose of the author, even when the language isn’t flawlessly precise. Simple computers often require such arcane precision, but humans are elegant, context-sensitive communicators who build our knowledge about a thing by synthesizing data from a number of sources, in this case various passages of scripture. We interpret scripture by taking the whole body of what God has communicated to us, and bringing it to bear on a particular passage.

So when John 1 says that all things were created through the Word, and nothing was created apart from him, are we required to say that he himself cannot be an exception to this statement? If we have other reasons from other scriptures to say that Jesus had a prior, created nature at the beginning of the world, then even a strong, universal statement like this can be implicitly nuanced in the same way that Paul explicitly nuanced his strong statement in 1 Corinthians.

As argued above, Pattern Christology is entirely unimpeded by a full-blown trinitarian rendering of John 1. We believe in a plurality of persons in the godhead (two rather than three), and that one of them is properly called the Word/Logos. So even if the trinitarian rendering could be correct, our view would stand regardless.

However, while John 1 is often used as a prooftext for the Trinity, upon close examination it requires trinitarians to change the meaning of “God” from one half of a verse to the other. Patternists observe that the passage would be better seen as referencing the incarnation of God in Christ, because a form of the incarnation may be evidently seen in the Old Testament through the Angel of the LORD, prior to his incarnation as a human. John 1 may be better interpreted as the Angel of the LORD being with Yahweh, and the Angel of the LORD being Yahweh himself, the firstborn of creation. It is entirely valid use of language to say that the incarnate Christ created all things, including his own created nature, so this should be seen as the preferred interpretation of John 1, instead of the trinitarian view that it describes plurality within the uncreated godhead.

In any case, Pattern Christology is entirely compatible with both views, so John 1 is no threat to the Pattern. Rather, it should be seen as either a problem passage for the Trinity, or a passage that is irrelevant to the nature of God discussion.

I was listening through a sermon today from one of my favorite churches. In it, the pastor developed a useful objection that trinitarians bring against many non-trinitarian cults, grounded in Jesus’ claim that no one has seen the Father. Because this objection also threatens a patternist view, I thought that I would draft up my thoughts on how best to respond to it.

In particular, the pastor attacked the Jehovah’s Witness idea that “Jehovah” and “Father” are synonymous terms that can be used interchangeably in scripture. I made a general case for the same idea in my article, Are the terms “God” and “Father” interchangeable in scripture? Here we’ll look at the two passages this pastor used to give a negative case on the subject, John 6:46 and Genesis 18:1. In the first, Jesus claimed that no one had ever seen the Father except himself. In the second, we see God (Yahweh/Jehovah) appearing to Abraham and eating with him.

In bringing these two scriptures together, the pastor claimed that “Jehovah” and “Father” have to be distinguishable in some sense, since Abraham saw Jehovah, and according to Jesus, the Father cannot be seen. Trinitarians believe that there is one God (Jehovah), but three persons in the godhead — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So the appearance of Jehovah to Abraham is best viewed as God the Son (Jesus) appearing to him, with God the Father remaining obscured. Therefore Jesus can say that only he has seen the Father.

Is trinitarian theology the only way to reconcile these two passages? I would argue that no, pattern theology handles this same dilemma without any difficulty. Furthermore, the trinitarian use of John 6 in this way ignores the immediate and broader context of the passage, adding meaning to Jesus’ words that he didn’t intend. Jesus is not saying that he alone in all of time and history is the only person to see the Father. Rather, he is commenting on the general, normal way that humans learn from God, receiving his word through a mediator (Jesus), and receiving the direct divine aid of the Holy Spirit in understanding and applying it.

To start, trinitarians should be able to concede that on further examination of the scriptures, at least one person other than Jesus has seen the Father, namely the prophet Daniel. If this isn’t conceded, then it’s difficult to understand how a trinitarian could reconcile Daniel’s vision of God (the Ancient of Days) engaging with Jesus (the son of man) in Daniel 7. It reads,

As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came out from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened…

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. (Dan 7:9-10, 13-14)

Everyone in this discussion should be able to set aside metaphysical questions of the Ancient of Days having hands and hair. Both trinitarians and patternists believe in an immaterial transcendent God who engages with creation through anthropomorphic language and physical manifestations (such as the incarnate Jesus, and the preincarnate angel of the Lord). But God in his true form transcends these material constructs.

The question at hand is the identity of the Ancient of Days. He is clearly a person who is different from the son of man, and we know that Jesus identified himself as the latter. From a trinitarian standpoint, that leaves the Father and the Holy Spirit. I doubt there will be much argument on this point, so I won’t waste space laboriously defending it. But we know that Jesus is described in many places as descending from the Father and returning to Him, and receiving his heavenly kingdom from Him (e.g. Heb 1-2). So it seems clear that the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7 is best identified as the Father described elsewhere, and that we are viewing a prophetic record of what happened (or would happen) in Heaven after Jesus ascended.

Because Daniel uses visual language in his description of the event — “As I looked,” and “I saw in the night visions” — We know that these are things that Daniel saw. Whether that sight was “in the body or out of the body, I do not know” (2Co 12:2-3), so one might quibble that Daniel didn’t “see” the Father with his physical eyes. But such a point only raises the more relevant question of what Jesus actually meant when he said that no one has seen the Father. He clearly didn’t mean that no one sees him in any sense at all. Rather, his words are in a specific context, being limited by the issue he was dealing with at the time.

Let’s look at the context of Jesus’ words. Beyond what I’ll cite here, the broader context is the Bread of Life Discourse, where people were responding in excitement to his recent miracle of creating and distributing masses of food. Instead of feeding them a second time, Jesus used their request for more food to point them to their deeper need for spiritual food from God. This didn’t give them what they wanted, so they grumbled against him, and he took a moment to use their discontent as an example of their lack of spiritual nourishment. It’s in that context that he says the following:

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me — not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. (Jhn 6:44-46)

Importantly, Jesus’ statement that no one has seen the Father is a side point that qualifies his statement about God’s intention to teach (i.e. spiritually feed) everyone who belongs to him. To establish this intention, he quotes the prophet Isaiah’s description of the final state of Israel and the world, when “all your children shall be taught by the LORD, and great shall be the peace of your children” (Isa 54:13). We know from other scriptures and biblical themes (e.g. Rev 22:1-5) that the final state will restore us to a relationship with God of intimate, face-to-face fellowship. That fellowship has been hindered by sin, so that God can only dwell with his people through a temple veil. But ultimately God’s intention is to dwell with and within each person, instructing us directly. As the prophet Jeremiah said of Jesus’ work in this regard,

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jer 31:33-34)

This parallels Isaiah’s prophecy, and elaborates on what the personal instruction of God looks like that we will receive in the end. Despite their being primarily about a future, eschatological event, Jesus uses prophecies like these in his teachings about the nature of his present-day work. But he has to deal with the distinction that prophecy sometimes fails to make between his first and second comings. Theologians refer to this tension as the “already-not-yet” fulfillment of prophecy. In this case, Jesus’ first advent to earth brought with it a renewal of our relationship with God, such that we receive instruction of the Holy Spirit poured out upon us at Pentecost. But we don’t yet have that face-to-face relationship with the Ancient of Days that God ultimately intends.

So in stating that “no one has seen the Father except he who is from God,” Jesus isn’t describing a metaphysical or strict rule of reality that God the Father is intrinsically hidden from all people in all time and history. He’s describing the normal, isolated condition of mankind that came from our rebellion against God, and that continues even after Jesus’ first advent and our reunion with God through the Holy Spirit. We still cannot see God and live; our only way to approach him is through the death of another. In days past this was done through animal sacrifice, such as when Abel approached God at Eden. But always this is ultimately through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, the centerpiece of his first coming.

So in the present age, we are in a situation where we are born, live, and die on earth, while the Father (God, the Ancient of Days) is on his throne in Heaven. We have access to God’s Spirit through the work of Jesus, and when we die we behold the face of God in open, heavenly fellowship. But those who are still on earth prior to his second coming rely on the mediation of Jesus, the man who came down to us from Heaven, to receive God’s instruction.

So in this passage, Jesus presents himself as the bread of life / divine instruction that we need. In his pursuit of precision, Jesus grants that we now receive instruction directly from God, through the Holy Spirit. But that work of the Spirit is evidenced by our coming to Jesus. This is why he says, “Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me — not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father.”

To summarize then, Jesus is the bread of life and the incarnate instruction/word of God that we need. God also instructs us independent of the recorded words of Jesus, through His Holy Spirit. But this instruction by its very nature will draw us to Christ. Therefore anyone who is truly instructed by God will accept the words of the man he sent from Heaven.

As we’ve seen, Jesus’ words in John 6 have no real relevance the question of the Father’s ability to appear to people. He generally chooses not to appear to people, because of the impact of sin on his relationship with man. But there is nothing in God’s nature or Jesus’ description of the situation in John 6 that requires every appearance of God to be done through the trinity’s “Son” personage. To the contrary, we’ve seen that at least one such appearance (in Daniel 7) must be done by some divine person other than the Son, unless trinitarians want to have the son of man and God the Son interacting with each-other as different people. All in all, pairing Jesus’ bread of life discourse with Old Testamant appearances of God has no relevance to discussions on the nature of God. As often happens in trinitarian rhetoric, the passage is taken out of its intended context, and applied to a question that it was never meant to address.

Even with that said, however, as a patternist I actually agree with trinitarians that God’s appearance to Abraham was probably done through the preincarnate Christ, the Angel of the Lord. In many places in the Old Testamant, God manifested himself through this angel who was both God and distinct from God. But as I argue in my article on Jesus’ relationship with the Father, the trinity is a poor explanation for this phenomenon. Not only are the Lord and the angel of the Lord described as distinct from each-other, but they are also described as one and the same person. The trinity allows for a plurality of persons that share one divine (and impersonal) essence, but it doesn’t allow for composite personhood, where two or more persons behave as one. For this you need a view like pattern christology.

The trinitarian use of John 6 therefore fails on three counts.

1. Jesus’ claim that no one has seen the Father says little about the nature of God’s old testament appearances. Taken in context, the Father is not actually being portrayed as ontologically inaccessible.
2. Trinitarians fail to establish that their view alone can explain such old testament appearances.
3. The trinitarian explanation of old testament appearances does not sufficiently account for the overlap we see between the person of the Lord (the Father) and the person of his angel (the Son). Sometimes these persons are distinguished from each-other. Sometimes they speak and act as if they were the same person.

If the Church had a proper understanding of what the trinity is — a fallible, human attempt to reconcile the many scripture passages that speak about God’s nature (a theological system) — then these failures would simply reflect failures of human intellect. Minor failures like this could be seen as areas of improvement for the trinitarian system that can be tolerated with grace and humility by other genuine Christians who disagree with it. But because the trinity is held to be a central pillar of the Christian faith, a doctrine that determines one’s status as a true or false Christian (as this pastor claims, along with many others), failures like this need to be emphasized and highlighted until trinitarians recognize the shortcomings of their system, and allow for alternative attempts to explain the various scriptures that we see discussing the nature of God and Christ.

The key issue that patternists have with the trinity is that it views Jesus’ sonship toward God as a property of his divine nature, rather than his human nature. While agreeing with trinitarians that Jesus is truly God and truly man, we maintain that the title “son of God” is a reference to his human nature, that he is a son of God in the same kind of way that Christians are sons of God, as creatures who bear the image and likeness of God. A key verse that ties image-bearing and sonship together is found in Genesis.

This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. (Gen 5:1-3)

Here we see image-bearing and sonship correlated, such that to have a child is to create someone in your own image and likeness. Thus in the case of Christ, a natural understanding would be that he is a son of God because he is a creature, created in the image of God. While he truly is God incarnate, he isn’t the son of God because of his divinity; rather, he is a son because of his humanity.

In response to this point, trinitarians will sometimes point out (rightly) that image-bearing and sonship cannot be the same thing because unbelievers are considered children of Satan, yet they still bear the image of God. Genesis 9:6 for example puts forward a prohibition against murdering any human being, not just against murdering those in a right relationship with God. The rationale is that it is wrong to murder a human (believer or unbeliever), because all humans are created in the image of God.

And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. (Gen 9:5-6)

Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (Jhn 8:43-44)

For the sake of brevity, the main articles on this site simply acknowledge that there is a difference between image-bearing and sonship, but don’t do much to further elaborate on the problem and its natural solution. This article is therefore provided to help clarify the issue, and to demonstrate that pattern christology stands regardless.

The relationship between image-bearing and sonship is most precisely defined as a “creates-a” relationship. They are not the same thing; rather one creates the other. As we saw in the case of Seth, Adam slept with Eve, and this produced a new, distinct organism, created in the image and likeness of Adam (and Eve). Seth was then given the relationship and title “son of Adam” because of his natural descent (Luk 3:38). In the same way, every child created by two parents is, by default, given this immediate relationship with his parents, by which he naturally calls them father/mother. Under normal circumstances, these two parents will then nurture and care for the child, until he reaches adulthood.

Unfortunately, because of sin, that relationship is often broken. A man may sleep with his girlfriend, impregnate her, then leave before the child is ever born. In such a case, the child is created in the image of that man, but he doesn’t share a father/son relationship with him. If the child is lucky, another man may marry the woman, and fill the role of a father. Or, the child may grow up without a father. Here then we see a distinction between someone’s biological vs legal parents, between image-bearing and sonship.

A good example of this breaking of relationship can be seen in Abraham’s relationship with Ishmael. Because of his wife Sarai’s barrenness, Abram took a concubine named Hagar, and had a child with her, to serve as his heir. When the Lord fulfilled his promise to give Sarai a child however, she no longer wanted Hagar’s child Ishmael to be part of the family.

So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not be heir with my son Isaac.” And the thing was very displeasing to Abraham on account of his son. But God said to Abraham, “Be not displeased because of the boy and because of your slave woman. Whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for through Isaac shall your offspring be named. And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring.” (Gen 21:10-13)

Abraham thus disowned Ishmael, sending him and his mother away from the family. This led to a situation where he had two biological children, but only one recognized, legal son and heir. We see this recognition of Isaac alone in the following chapter.

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” (Gen 22:1-2)

Prior to the rejection of Ishmael, Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Through natural descent, they were both given a father/son relationship with Abraham. Yet because of his rejection of Ishmael, Abraham was brought into a phase of life where God now recognized only Isaac. Only Isaac had a continuing relationship with his father, and only Isaac served as his legal heir.

Thus we see that in a biblical understanding of parentage, image-bearing creates a natural father/son relationship between parent and child. The effects of sin however can break that relationship, while the natural descent of image-bearing remains intact. So when we try to understand God’s view of unregenerate man, we can simultaneously affirm that we all bear the image of God (through natural descent), but apart from Christ, Satan is our father, the one from which we learn, the one who we imitate.

The other side of this coin is the creation of father/son relationships without biological descent. Image-bearing creates a relationship of sonship, but it is not the only thing that creates it. Adoption is the process by which a parent accepts a child into his family as a recognized, legal son and heir. It establishes a real father-son relationship, even when the son may bear the image of a different biological father.

We see this exemplified very simply in the life of Joseph, who adopted Jesus, and raised Him, regardless of not being Jesus’ natural father. Jacob offers a more complex example, where he adopted two of his grandchildren. In this case, Ephraim and Manassah actually bore the image of Jacob, being his natural descendants. But his adoption of them elevated their legal status such that they were given the same legal standing as his immediate children, rather than being a generation removed.

God’s adoption of us is another interesting case, because it’s an adoption back into the family from which we originally descend. Adam was created in the image and likeness of God, and thus he initially had a father/son relationship with Him. But that relationship was broken when he rebelled and accepted Satan’s implanted word, rather than the word of God. We as Adam’s descendants therefore begin in the foreign family of Satan, but when we accept Christ’s offer of salvation, we’re adopted back into the family from which we naturally descend, namely the family of God (cf. Luk 3:38, Rom 8:14-17).

So it’s true that image-bearing and sonship do not always go hand-in-hand. Image-bearing creates a father/son relationship, but the rejection and adoption of sons (and daughters) can cause a family to deviate from natural, biological descent. This raises a question of boundaries in the area of adoption. Can anyone be lawfully adopted into a family? Or are there limits that God would enforce on the institution?

For example, can a dog be adopted as the son and legal heir of a husband and wife? Most people would probably say ‘no’, although writing pets into wills has become more common in recent years. Some might look to sentience as the determining factor for inheritance, but then you run into a similar problem with angels. Could someone adopt the angel Gabriel, and make him a son and legal heir?

Considerations like this lead us to a second relationship that image-bearing and sonship seem to share. Not only does image-bearing create a father/son relationship, it also defines the boundaries of legitimate relationships created through adoption. In a word, biblical adoption is adoption within a kind.

Genesis tells us that God created distinct “kinds” of creatures, which reproduce within that kind. When mating, giraffes produce more giraffes, storks produce more storks, and humans produce more humans. For example,

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds–livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” (Gen 1:24-26)

This natural descent of creatures within a kind is effectively the same thing as image-bearing. Just as all humans bear the image of Adam (1Co 15:49), so all giraffes bear the image of the first giraffe, etc.  So when it comes to the issue of adoption, is it legitimate for a human being to adopt a giraffe, or for wolves to raise a human, etc.?

This passage would raise some problems with cross-kind adoption, because God grants dominion over the earth to human beings. Biblical sonship is importantly tied to inheritance; sons are legal heirs of the dominion (land, animals, other property etc.) of their fathers. If humans are to have dominion over all other creatures, then a human father leaving his house and land to a giraffe son would grant dominion to the animals, which goes against God’s design for the earth.

In a sense however, cross-kind adoption is what happened when Adam heeded the voice of the serpent, rather than the word of God. The dominion that Adam inherited from God was now exercised under the authority of a beast, namely the serpent, rather than his natural father God. This may be why God views redemption as a process of transferring the kingdoms of man from the control of beasts to that of the son of man (Daniel 7). So while cross-kind adoption may not be supported by God, it may still be a recognized form of adoption resulting from the fall.

In any case, when rightly performed, adoption seems to be limited to parents and children within a kind. This is why Jesus had to become man in order to redeem, inherit and reclaim the earth from Satan.

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. (Heb 2:14-17)

Here we see that Jesus could not redeem the earth as an angel (or a dog, or a giraffe etc.). He had to be a man, because dominion over the earth is granted to mankind, who was currently enslaved to the devil. The previous chapter specifically situates this in the context of inheritance. So for humans at least, and likely for all of creation, adoption and inheritance have to occur within a kind.

Image-bearing and sonship are therefore related in two ways. First, image-bearing creates a father/son relationship. Second, legitimate sonship can only occur when both parent and child share the same ultimate ancestor / image.

In this final section, I’ll tie together the concepts discussed thus far, and work to then answer the question of how Jesus’ sonship relates to that of the everyday Christian.

First, it’s important to fully elaborate on what the above understanding of kinds implies about our relationship with God, our first parent. Luke’s genealogy makes it clear that God is the first parent of our race, that he had/has a true father/son relationship with Adam, with Christ, and with all of his adopted children. In a word, this implies that humans are of the same “kind” as God. Allow me to explain what that means.

The first parents of all the kinds described in Genesis came to be in the first week of creation. In the case of mankind, we also had parents who began at that point, namely Adam and Eve. However our ancestry goes back one step further, because Adam was the son of God. He was created in the image and likeness of God. This means that God is the first ancestor in our lineage (Luk 3:38). God is the first of our “kind.” That is why he is able to reject and adopt children of man, generally behaving as a father to us, etc. A question then naturally arises — What does this mean in terms of the nature of man? Are we little gods?

Trinitarian discussions on the nature of God will rightly point out that we do not have the same “substance” as God. He is transcendent, dwelling before and outside of time; we are made of the dust of the earth (Gen 3:19). Additionally, we know that the substance of man changes in the resurrection, yet we are still of the same family; we still bear the image of God (granted, through a different Adam, 1Co 15:39-49). On the other hand, humans share the same basic substance (elements of the earth etc.) as any plant or animal. However we do not share the same information, the same kind, the same common line of descent (despite what Darwinists may claim).

So when we talk about being of the same “kind” as God, it’s important to recognize that this has nothing to do with the substance of God vs man; we are not little gods. It is simply a description of the shared information that forms our image of God, the design that allows us to think and act like him (notwithstanding sin and finitude). It’s the implanted word of God spoken during creation that distinguishes one kind from another, not the substance out of which it is formed.

I write this because some trinitarians will claim that Jesus’ sonship toward God implies that he has the same substance as God, and I want to be sure that we’re thinking clearly and biblically about this claim. While patternists would agree with the conclusion — that Jesus has the same substance as God according to his divine nature; he is truly God — we would disagree that this has anything to do with Jesus’ sonship. he is not the son of God through his divinity; rather, he is the son of God through his humanity, being created in the image of God.

That statement of course is imprecise, bringing us back to the original purpose of this article. Trinitarians object that not all image-bearers are sons of God, thus the patternist’s insistence on a human source for Jesus’ sonship is problematic. With the backdrop of this article in place however, we can now further nuance the patternist claim to address this objection.

When we say that Jesus’ sonship comes from his image-bearing, this appeals to the natural relationship that a child has with his natural father. Jesus’ human nature was a direct creation of God (Luk 1:35), making him a direct descendant of God — the first that the world had seen since Adam. As with any other instance of image-bearing, this naturally created (or more precisely, continued) a father/son relationship between Jesus and God, that in his case was never broken. So while it’s true that not all image-bearers are sons of God, due to the broken relationships produced by sin, in Jesus’ case the father/son relationship was a natural result of his image-bearing, not the result of adoption, or any other mechanism.

In the case of Christians, who are adopted into the family of God, it is also imprecise to claim that we are sons of God because we bear the image of God. While it’s true that we all bear the image of God, it’s equally true that non-Christians also bear the image of God, yet are not regarded as sons of God. So a more precise statement would be that image-bearing is required to be in the family of God (he does not adopt giraffes or other creatures outside of his kind), but it is not sufficient. Both image-bearing and adoption are required to join our brother Jesus in the family as sons and heirs of God.

Nevertheless, in both cases it is precisely because we are creatures, of the same kind as God, that we are eligible to be called his sons. Jesus is a direct son and creation, while we are adopted descendants of God. But in both cases, it is our image-bearing as creatures that enables us to be God’s children.

Here it could be objected that I haven’t proven the patternist point, that Jesus’ sonship flows from his humanity. Rather, I’ve simply allowed it as another possible interpretation alongside the trinitarian conception of Christ’s sonship as a property of his divinity. However, the purpose of this article isn’t to prove the patternist point; it’s simply to answer the trinitarian objection. Arguing in favor of the position is left to other articles.

But the basic argument is that image-bearing provides us with a well-established doctrinal basis for understanding the sonship of Jesus. When we come to New Testament claims that Jesus is the son of God, we already have tremendous amounts of old testament scripture that develops the context of what means to the Jewish mind. To bear someone’s image is to be that person’s biological descendent — and barring any broken relationships, to be that person’s son and heir. So if the New Testament teaches us that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15), that he is truly human (Heb 2:5-17), that he is the “son of God” (Heb 26:63-64) and “co-heirs” with God’s other children (Rom 8:17), then why would we interpret his sonship outside of that rich context, as something entirely unrelated to God’s image in mankind? The trinitarian conception of the Son generates a lot of new doctrine, and new interpretations of old terminology, that seems very foreign to a natural, in-context reading of scripture. Certainly this is done from good intentions, to address various problems that come from a natural reading (e.g. the preincarnate sonship problem). But perhaps it’s worth stepping back and seeing if there are other ways to deal with these problems. without having to entirely separate the sonship of Christ from that of his brethren.

The following is an excerpt from a conversation I had with a trinitarian friend who was responding to my claim that scripture uses the terms “God” and “Father” interchangeably.

Patternist: In my view, I believe that scripture uses the terms God and Father interchangeably, in a way that makes the term Father refer to the entire union of the godhead, not just one person.

Trinitarian: Does that mean that if I point out to you the many, many places in which Scripture refers to Jesus Himself as “God”, you’ll change your mind? Because that would mean that that it does NOT always use those terms interchangeably, right?

First let’s acknowledge the point being made by my friend. The word for “God” in the new testament (theos) is not always used interchangeably with the term “Father.” For example, taking the discussion away from the complexity of Christ and the hypostatic union, scripture even uses the word “theos” to speak of idols, which are clearly not used interchangeably with the “Father” who is described as the one true God (e.g. Act 19:26-27). So yeah, it would be silly to apply a wooden hermeneutic to scripture that acts as if every time the word “God” appears, it must be referring to the being/person described in scripture as “the Father.” The context determines the meaning.

The point that I was making in my statement isn’t that theos is always used interchangeably with the Father, but rather that scripture uses them interchangeably (in one or more places) in a way that makes the term Father refer to the entire union of the godhead, rather than one person in the godhead. Perhaps a clearer statement would be to say, “Many scriptures exist that use the terms God and Father interchangeably, specifically in a way that makes the term Father refer to the entire union of the godhead, not just one person.”

The fact that “God” and “Father” are often used interchangeably is recognized even by trinitarians. Wayne Grudem says the following:

When we realize that the New Testament authors generally use the name “God” (Gk. θεός, G2536) to refer to God the Father and the name “Lord” (Gk. Κύριος, G3261) to refer to God the Son, then it is clear that there is another trinitarian expression in 1 Corinthians 12:4–6: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspires them all in every one.”

— Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, chapter 14

Certainly Grudem has no problem saying that Jesus is God (“theos”), and is referred to as such in scripture. But he’s highlighting a trend in scripture where the Father is referred to with the term “God”, and this person is viewed as distinct from Jesus. For example,

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Rom 6:8-11 ESV)

In this passage, Jesus is described as living his life unto God, in the same way that Christians are to live our lives unto God (i.e. for the glory of God, obedient to God etc.). This causes a tension, because we all agree that Jesus is God. Why then does it speak of God here as a different person?

Trinitarians generally resolve this by appealing to the plurality of persons within the godhead. They claim that “God” here is to be understood as “God the Father” in the trinitarian sense of the phrase — “God” is the first person out of three in the trinity. This is supported by the fact that Paul identifies God as “the Father” earlier in Rom 6:4; clearly “God” and “Father” are being used interchangeably in this context. Trinitarians will therefore take all of the theological meaning that their system ascribes to the term “Father,” and import it into the term “God” when it’s used in passages like Romans 6. This is why Grudem says, “the New Testament authors generally use the name ‘God’ (Gk. θεός, G2536) to refer to God the Father.” He is acknowledging the distinction that is often made between “God” and “Jesus/Christ/Lord” in the new testament, and prescribing a hermeneutic (method of interpretation) that allows this phenomenon to align with the trinitarian system.

However, this hermeneutic seems to have some cracks, some places in scripture where it doesn’t work well, some of which we’ll look at in depth below. At the very least, it’s an odd choice of words for the new testament authors to use, if they were truly trinitarian in their theology. Trinitarians in our day are very careful to speak with terminology that ascribes the word “God” to all three persons — God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Yet the language used here and in many other places (by many different authors) draws a distinction between Jesus and God, and views Jesus as having a relationship with God that is similar to ours (e.g. vv 10-11 above, “For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.”).

So bringing forward scriptures that refer to Jesus as “God” (theos) would not impact the discussion in any way, because patternists agree with trinitarians that Jesus is truly God and truly man, and that scripture speaks of Him as God in many places (e.g. Jhn 20:28). The issue at hand is that scripture also speaks of Jesus as someone who is distinct from God; trinitarians and patternists then disagree on how best to resolve that kind of language in our respective theological systems.

To better understand the disagreement, we’ll consider the opening to Jesus’ high priestly prayer.

When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (Jhn 17:1-3)

Here again we have a distinction being made between “the only true God” and Jesus. Trinitarians and patternists will of course agree that Jesus too is the only true God; he is immanuel, God with us (Mat 1:23); he views himself as the great I AM who was before Abraham (Jhn 8:58). Thus when we pull together the language of various scriptures, we have to acknowledge a tension, that scripture speaks of Jesus as being God, and also (simultaneously) as being distinct from God.

When faced with language like the above, where Jesus is speaking to “God” or the “only true God” etc., trinitarians will generally reconcile this in one of two ways.

1. Like what we saw with Grudem, some will claim that this is a conversation between two persons within the godhead, God the Father and God the Son. Whenever Jesus refers to someone else as “God,” this should be interpreted as God the Father, and he is speaking as God the Son. (e.g. David Guzik’s commentary on John 17)
2. Others claim that this is a conversation between Jesus’ human nature, and his divine nature. (e.g. Matthew Henry’s commentary on John 17)

In other words, you can appeal to a distinction between two persons within the godhead, or you can appeal to a distinction between Jesus’s humanity and his divinity. The former approach has the difficulty of reconciling the fact that God the Son spoke as if God the Father alone is the one true God, which doesn’t fit well with monotheism and/or the true divinity of Jesus (see also my discussion of the Shema and the person of the Father). The latter approach requires us to grant distinct personhood to Jesus’ human nature, which is generally considered a heresy by trinitarians (see my discussion on nestorianism).

Patternists take the second approach, believing that it provides more explanatory scope (i.e. it explains more passages of scripture, better preserving the natural sense of the text). I’ll quote Matthew Henry’s treatment of John 17 to get the sense of his view, which I would agree with.

1. He prays to God as a Father: He lifted up his eyes, and said, Father. Note, As prayer is to be made to God only, so it is our duty in prayer to eye him as a Father, and to call him our Father. All that have the Spirit of adoption are taught to cry Abba, Father, Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6. If God be our Father, we have liberty of access to him, ground of confidence in him, and great expectations from him. Christ calls him here holy Father, (v. 11) and righteous Father, v. 25. For it will be of great use to us in prayer, both for direction and for encouragement, to call God as we hope to find him.
2. He prayed for himself first. Though Christ, as God, was prayed to, Christ, as man, prayed; thus it became him to fulfill all righteousness.

— Matthew Henry, Commentary on John 17

According to Matthew Henry, Jesus here is praying to God as a man. Rather than view John 17 as a conversation between two co-equal and co-eternal persons of the godhead, it’s also possible to interpret this chapter as a man (Jesus) speaking with his God in the same kind of a way that Christians would speak to God. Thus the terms “God” and “Father” in this passage come to refer to the God of the Old Testament, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the one true God of the Shema. Whatever plurality of persons may exist within the godhead, the terms “God” and “Father” are interpreted as referring to God as a whole.

One verse in John 17 challenges the idea that Jesus here can be speaking according to his human nature (Jhn 17:5); I dealt with that in depth in my article on the Angel of the Lord. With that objection set aside, we can affirm that scripture provides us with excellent support for the idea that Jesus had a human relationship with God. Throughout his earthly life, he worshiped Yahweh through his participation in the synagogue, temple worship, and sabbath feasts and sacrifices (Mat 13:53-58, Jhn 13, Mat 5:17). Furthermore, we have strong evidence of a human relationship with God in his temptation in the wilderness.

Three times, he made a decision to obey God rather than Satan.

• But he answered, “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'”
• Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'”
• Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.'”
  (Mat 4:4, 7, 10)

We know that God cannot be tempted with evil (Jas 1:13), and that Jesus here was truly tempted to commit sin (Heb 4:15) — to depart from the word of God, to put God to the test, and to worship and serve Satan rather than God. So it would be wrong to interpret this passage as teaching that God the Son was being tempted to depart from worshipping God the Father. The relationship between Jesus and God in this passage is not a relationship internal to the godhead, but rather a relationship that is external to the godhead, between Yahweh God, and Jesus the man. Jesus overcame the temptation to forsake this relationship, and became the only man to ever worship God without spot or blemish.

So when we encounter passages that describe Jesus as having a relationship with God, or interacting with God in some way, we have the option to view this through the lens of Jesus’ humanity. My contention is that doing so leads to a better, more consistent understanding of scripture than viewing it through the lens of his divinity (i.e. a relationship between God the Father and God the Son). Emphasizing his humanity in these passages doesn’t deny Jesus’ divinity in any way; it simply changes how we interpret his relationship to “God.”

With that said, it does change our understanding of the Father.

If the God that Jesus worshipped was Yahweh (and all the persons included therein) — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the one true God comprised of multiple persons — then we need to change our understanding of the Father. Passages that use the terms “God” and “Father” interchangeably would lead us to understand Yahweh (God) to be the Father of Jesus, and of the Christian. For example, after his work on the cross, Jesus said to Mary Magdalene,

Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ (Jhn 20:17)

Here Jesus says that he’s ascending to his God, who in the truest sense is also now his disciples’ God, through his work on the cross. In the same breath, he also says that he is ascending to his Father and our Father. I suppose that some fancy footwork could allow there to be a distinction between the Father to whom he is ascending, and the God to whom he is ascending, such that he is ascending to one person in the trinity according to his divine nature, and also ascending to the entire trinity according to his human nature. But this grates against the natural reading of the text, particularly since he begins by speaking only of one person to whom he is ascending, namely “the Father.” He seems to treat “God” and “Father” interchangeably — he is ascending to one person, the Father in heaven, who is our Father and his Father, Our God and his God — namely Yahweh. “Father” therefore becomes a term that describes the entire godhead, not just one person within the godhead.

Similarly, a couple passages in the new testament explicitly teach monotheism, and the language they use describes the Father as the one true God (Yahweh), in distinction to Jesus.

For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth–as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”– yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1Co 8:5-6)

​​There is one body and one Spirit–just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call– one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph 4:4-6)

Again, without question Jesus is truly God, the one true God of the universe. But the term “Father” is used to describe that one true God. That means that “Father” must refer to the entire godhead, Yahweh, not just one person. Whatever persons may compose Yahweh (I believe in two, the Word and the Spirit), the godhead itself is also personal, the person identified as Yahweh God in the old testament, and the “Father” in the new testament. This is why patternists say that the Father dwells in Christ through the Word; it is appropriate to call him both the Father (God) incarnate (Isa 9:6), and the Word incarnate (Jhn 1:14).

Similarly, it’s also appropriate to say that the Father dwells in the bride of Christ through the Spirit (with of course some qualifications; we are not divine as a result of our indwelling). Consider Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians.

What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” (2Co 6:16-18)

In this passage, God speak about and to his people. The question we have to ask is, which person of the godhead is speaking? Is it the Father, the Son or the Spirit? Well we know that Christians are a temple of the Holy Spirit (1Co 6:19, Jhn 14:16-17). Paul here is making a point about our being a temple within which God dwells, so presumably the person who says, “I will make my dwelling among them; I will be their God, and they will shall be my people” is the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit dwells with and within us. Yet at the end of the thought, the “God” who is speaking says, “I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me.” So it seems that our Father is the person who is speaking, and claiming that he will dwell with and within us as He would a temple made with hands. And we know that the Father of the Christian is the Father of Christ (1Pe 1:3, 1Jo 4:7-9, Jhn 20:17).

So if “Father” refers to only one person in the godhead, this passage becomes difficult to interpret. We have one speaker claiming to be both the Father and the Holy Spirit, which doesn’t fit well within a trinitarian paradigm that views a hard distinction between those two persons, without any sort of overlap. However, if the godhead itself is a composite person — two persons who are one, the Word and Spirit who together form the Father (God) — then God can speak in a more fluid way that allows for overlap between the Father and the Spirit. Here God (the Father of the Christian) says that he will dwell within the Christian, and we know from other passages that God does this through His Spirit (cf. similar language in Eph 2:13-22).

We also see fluid language used concerning the Father and the Word (granting that this may actually be due to a different cause). At the same moment, they can be viewed as distinct from one another, and also the same person.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (Jhn 1:1)

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life– the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us– (1Jo 1:1-2)

Trinitarians rightly identify the “God” of John 1:1 as the Father who was with the Word. As highlighted above, John himself verifies this in the parallel opening of his first epistle. But this raises a subtle problem when you look closely at the phrasing of John 1; replacing “Father” for “God” leads to a non-trinitarian idea.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the Father, and the Word was the Father.

Trinitarians draw a hard line between the personhood of the Word (who they call God the Son) and the Father, such that the Word is not the Father in any sense (aside from sharing a divine essence with him). So when John 1 says that the Word was with God, trinitarian theology can handle this if the term “God” is understood as “God the Father.” However, when John 1 says that the Word was God, trinitarians have to shift the meaning of “God” within the span of a single verse from “God the Father” to “divine” or “part of the one true God”

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the Father, and the Word was divine.

I view this as a problem for trinitarian theology, as we have no indication in John 1 that the meaning of “God” changes from one breath to the next. Rather, there needs to some way in which the Word can be God, and at the same time be distinct from God, similar to how the Spirit is God (our Father), and is also distinct from God (our Father). If we view the godhead itself as the Father, composed of two persons who are one, the Word and the Spirit, then we are better able to address the fluidity of language like what we find in John 1 and and Ephesians 2.

As I said the beginning of this article, the terms “God” and “Father” are not always used interchangeably in scripture. However in those (many) places where they are interchangeable, and where “God” is described as a person who is distinct from Jesus, we need to explain why the new testament authors chose to write this way, given that Jesus is God. Some will appeal to a plurality within the godhead, and claim that the authors intended to differentiate between two persons in the godhead, “God” (the Father) and the “Son of God” (God the Son). Patternists view this as a forced or unnatural hermeneutic that encounters some difficulties when certain scriptures are examined carefully, such as those we looked at above. Instead of appealing to plurality within the godhead, patternists view Jesus as a human son of God (like Adam, like the Christian), who relates to God as his Father, through his human nature.

This allows us to use “God” and “Father” interchangeably in passages that require us to, without having to change the meaning of “God” that we’ve inherited from the old testament. “God” is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — he is not one person within the godhead; rather he is the godhead; he is Yahweh, the one true God. This still allows for plurality within the godhead; we just don’t include the Father as one of those internal persons. The Word is the Father, and the Spirit is the Father. They are also both distinct from the Father, being only one person out of two that compose the godhead. This concept of a composite union allows two people to be viewed as one person, not unlike the language that we also see speaking of Jesus and God as distinct persons, yet also one person.

Hopefully that clarifies the point that I was trying to make. I’ll close this article with a sampling of verses that I found concerning the interchangeability of “God” and “Father” and other topics discussed. Many more could be added, and further elaborated.

In Christ,
~ trinity berean

• Jesus has a God: Rom 15:5-7, 2Co 1:1-4, Rev 1:4-6, Eph 4:4-6, Eph 1:1-3, 17, 2Co 11:31
• Jesus is viewed as distinct from God: Jhn 14:1-2, Rom 6:8-11, Rom 15:5-7, 1Co 1:3-4, 9, Jhn 6:44-46, Jhn 13:1-3, Jhn 17:1-3, Jhn 20:17, 1Co 8:5-6, 2Co 1:1-4, Jhn 5:18, Jhn 16:2-3, 1Jo 4:14-16, 2Jo 1:9, Eph 4:4-6, Rev 1:4-6, Rom 6:8-11, Phil 2:5-11, 2Co 11:31, 1Ti 1:1-2, Tit 1:1-4
  
• Jesus and Christians are both children/sons of God: Rom 8:15-17, Heb 12:5-11 (cf. Pro 3:11-12), 1Co 1:3-4, 9, Jhn 20:17, 2Co 1:1-4, Eph 1:1-3, 17, 1Jo 3:1-2, 2Co 11:31, Gal 1:1-4, Col 1:1-3, 1Th 1:1-4, 1Th 3:9-13, 2Th 1:1-12
• God is the Father: Rom 15:5-7, Jhn 6:44-46, Jhn 8:41-42, Jhn 17:1-3, Jhn 8:41-42, Jhn 16:27-30, Jhn 20:17, 1Co 8:5-6, 2Co 1:1-4, Jhn 5:18, Jhn 6:31-33, Jhn 16:2-3, 1Jo 4:14-16, 2Jo 1:9, Eph 4:4-6, Rev 1:4-6, Heb 12:5-11 (cf. Pro 3:11-12), Jas 3:7-10, Eph 1:1-3, 17, Jhn 4:23-24, Jhn 5:44-45, 1Jo 3:1-2, 2Co 11:31, Gal 1:1-4, Col 1:1-3, Col 3:16-17, 1Th 1:1-4, 1Th 3:9-13, 2Th 1:1-12, 1Ti 1:1-2, 2Ti 1:1-3, Tit 1:1-4
• Jesus came from God / was sent by God: Jhn 13:1-3, Jhn 16:27-30, Jhn 8:41-42, Jhn 6:44-46, Jhn 17:1-3
• The Father dwells in Christ / the Christian: Jhn 14:10, Jhn 10:38, Jhn 17:21, 1Jo 4:14-16, Eph 2:18-22, 2Co 6:16-18