The One God

Most theological conversations about the identity of God start with a question someone else formulated. How can three Persons share one substance? How can Jesus be fully God and fully man? What is the eternal relation of the Son to the Father? These are interesting questions. They are also post-apostolic questions. They were not the questions the Bible was written to answer.

The Bible was written to answer a different question. Who is this God, and what has he done?

This zone walks through the Bible's own answer.

What the zone contains

The Shema. Deuteronomy 6:4 is the confession Israel has recited for three thousand years. Jesus called it the greatest commandment. Paul echoed it as the foundation of Christian ethics. Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one.

John 17:3. Jesus's own confession on his last night. The Father is "the only true God," and Jesus is the one whom the Father sent. The anchor verse for New Testament Christology read in its Shema-shaped context.

1 Corinthians 8:6. Paul's expansion of the Shema in the context of idol food. One God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things. How Paul splits the Shema's two titles without compromising its confession of unity.

The Prologue of John. John 1:1 through 18 read as a new-creation manifesto, not as a metaphysical speculation. The Logos as the Word that God spoke, the Memra tradition of the Jewish Targums, the Shaliach principle of first-century agency, and what the qualitative grammar of John 1:1c actually allows.

Supporting studies. The Memra. The Shaliach principle. The Proclaimer reading. The I Am sayings in their Exodus context. The sending-language of the Fourth Gospel. Each of these supports the larger case by filling in a piece of the picture the Prologue opens.

Jesus the Messiah. Who Jesus actually is according to the New Testament's own categories. Messiah. Son of God. The human being through whom God has acted decisively. This is not a diminishment of Jesus. It is the identity Jesus himself claimed.

The Holy Spirit as power. What the Bible actually calls the Spirit, and what it attributes to the Spirit, when the Nicene lens is set aside. God's power in action, poured out on the people of God, gifting and empowering the church today.

How to read this zone

Read in order if you want the argument to build. Start with the Shema, move to John 17:3, then the Prologue, then work through the supporting studies. The zone is designed to be followed straight through, but each page also stands alone if you arrive at it from a subdomain's cross-link.

If you are coming to this zone from a specific tradition's comparison subdomain (LDS, JW, Trinitarian, Oneness, Muslim), the pages in this zone are the tradition-neutral canonical treatments. Everything here is written without insider vocabulary for any particular tradition, so any reader can follow it. The tradition-specific applications live on the subdomains.