ONE NAME, ONE TEMPLE, ONE THRONE, ONE LIGHT

The oneness of God the Father and God the Son is stressed over and over again in the New Testament in different ways. So I wrote to an anti-Trinitarian friend years ago the following facts (in bold). He recently replied to these, and his responses are given in italics. My rebuttals to his responses are given after his comments.

We are commanded to baptize in the NAME (not names) of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19).

About a year ago I watched an elderly pastor at ...Church (where my whole family was baptized ) baptize two kids “in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.” I asked him why he added “God the” to the Son and to the Holy Spirit when neither appears in the Bible. He said he always did it that way.

That elderly pastor may have only been doing that out of some habit he picked up years earlier. However, he was absolutely correct in doing so. Because for grammatical reasons, the only “name” that could apply equally to each of the three is “God.”

As R.T. France says, “(t)he fact that the three divine persons are spoken of as having a single 'name' is a significant pointer toward the trinitarian doctrine of three persons in one God.”

“The singular 'name' followed by the threefold reference to 'Father, Son, and Holy Spirit' suggests both unity and plurality in the Godhead. Here is the clearest Trinitarian 'formula' anywhere in the Gospels.” (Blomberg)

“Many commentators doubt that the trinitarian formulation was original at this point in Matthew's gospel...Nevertheless, trinitarian formulations (of liturgical and doxological character) are found in Paul's writings (2 C. 13:14; 1 C. 12:4-6), and the formula in this verse cannot be so very late, since it is found in much the same terms in the Didache (vii. 1-3), a fact which proves that it was known to the Church at the end of the first century...” (David Hill)

Revelation 21:22 states that God and Jesus together make up one temple.

As a rejoinder, my friend submitted without comment the following translation for this verse: “And I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb, are its temple.”

I assume that the implication to be derived from the plural verb “are” is that this verse teaches that the Father and Son are totally different entities. There are two problems with this reasoning: (1) in the Greek, the verb is the singular “is” rather than “are” and (2) no one is arguing against the fact that each of the Divine Personages is a separate entity. However, they are separate entities that constitute one Godhead. This is a seemingly rather abstruse theological point, but it is exactly what John also had in mind in the Prologue to his Gospel account when he said, “The Word was with God [implying separation] and the Word was God [implying unity].”

Revelation 22:3 shows that there is only one throne, not two, in heaven and that it belongs to Jesus and God the Father.

First to note is that my friend did not even bother to respond to Rev. 22:3 at all. And to bolster my contention that there is only one throne for the Father and the Son, G.K. Beale in his massive commentary on Revelation says, “That both are sitting on only one throne and together form one temple (21:22) enhances their perceived unity. Also, this unity is highlighted by both having the titles 'Alpha and Omega' (1:8; 21:6; 22:13).”

Instead of commenting on Revelation 22:3, I was given another quote without comment: Revelation 7:10 - and they cry out with a loud voice, saying,"Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb."

Apparently, the implication is that this verse shows only God on the throne but not Christ. But this verse records a hymn of praise written in poetic parallelism so that “God on the throne” and “the Lamb ('on the throne' implied)” are parallel to one another, not to be contrasted to one another. Secondly, the deduction that therefore the Lamb never sits on God's throne because he might not be on the throne on this particular occasion is an absurdly easy notion to dispel by simply going down a few more verses where we read:

15 "For this reason, they are before the throne of God; and they serve Him day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne shall spread His tabernacle over them.

16 "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; neither shall the sun beat down on them, nor any heat;

17 for the Lamb in the center of the throne shall be their shepherd, and shall guide them to springs of the water of life; and God shall wipe every tear from their eyes. "

It is mere nitpicking to argue that being in the center of God's throne is somehow an inferior position to sitting on that throne.

“And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb.” (Revelation 21:23)

Actually, I did not even include this in my initial correspondence as another example of the unity of the Father and the resurrected Son. Instead, my friend supplied it himself as what he felt was another demonstration that the two were not equal. But it actually proves the exact opposite.

To start with, J.M. Ford points out the logical problem with this statement if it is taken as simple prose: “If the glory of God enlightens the city then there is no further need of another lamp, even if this is the Lamb.” Thus, we should immediately suspect that we have another case of poetic parallelism at work. And for this, there is certainly evidence. Just look at the common parallelism between “light” and “lamp” in OT poetry:

    “The light                  is dark in their tent, and

    the lamp above them is put out.” (Job 18:6)

    “Your word is a lamp to my feet, and

                           a light to my path.” (Psalm 119:105)

In both cases, “lamp” is not contrasted with “light,” but expresses the exactly same concept.

“Both God and the Lamb may be the new luminaries, or, more precisely, the idea could be that the glory of God is identified in the second of these two clauses as the Lamb himself.” (Beale)

Leon Morris says that “it is in harmony with the general picture that the Lamb is put on a level with God as the source of light for the heavenly city.”