I have been watching some interesting videos by David Pawson, and found him to be a very reasoned and well-spoken theologian, and found myself in agreement with pretty much everything that I have heard of him so far. But talking about the agreements is going to be boring. 😀 It is the disagreements that start getting interesting, and I have found a fundamental one in the above video which I would like to comment on. He has given a series of two talks on the subject of the Trinity as follows:
In the second of the two videos (shown above), at 46:26 minutes into the video he says the following (emphasis added):
“Now I come to the most important thing I want to say. Let me put this very carefully: the real answer to the conundrum of the Trinity is to ask, In what sense is God three, and in what sense his he one? Don’t ever confuse those two things. There are some senses in which God is three, and other senses in which God is one; but the two are different, and must never be the same. Let’s just ask first about the three. God is three persons. The Father is not the Son, and is not the Spirit. His threeness is persons. He is not one person. Do you follow me? If only we had not allowed our minds to slip into thinking that it was three persons and one person at the same time; that is where we make the problem for people. He is three persons, but one God. So what he is three is different from what he is as one. Now I hope you follow me on that, because then it is no longer a problem. He is only three in some senses, and only one in entirely different senses. You are not asking the three and the one to be applied to the same thing. That is when you are into contradiction and mathematical nonsense.”
He says that the one true God is not a person. There he makes a very serious and fundamental error, as far as biblical doctrine is concerned. The one true God is indeed a (one) Person. That is how God is portrayed throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments. Throughout the Bible, the one God is referred to with the personal pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his,” which makes him a Person (i.e. one Person). God himself, the one true God, repeatedly refers to himself using the personal pronouns “I,” and “me,” which makes him a (one) Person. The one true God is indeed a Person, no doubts about it. Examples are too numerous to quote. One will be sufficient:
Exodus 20:2-3: “I am the Lord thy God, . . . Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
The use of the personal pronouns “I” and “me” indicates that the (one) God sees himself as a Person. And note in particular, that it is the One True God that is speaking here, not some imaginary construct. God, the One True God, uses the personal pronouns “I” and “me” to refer to himself, which makes him a Person (One Person). The reference is to the One God, not “one of the three”. That shatters his Trinitarian theology completely, which he has worked so hard and so carefully to construct in the two videos. In the first video, he has done a nice job of finding all the scripture references to a “triune Deity” in the Bible. It is in the second video, when he starts talking about the historical definitions, creedal statements, and the controversies that his theology starts to falter; and it breaks down completely when he finally reaches the conclusion that God is not a (one) person! His theology of the Trinity now lies in tatters; and he has a lot of work to do to build it up again, which he is not going to find easy to do.
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