Question 1

Does 1 Corinthians 8:6 make the Father alone God?

Accepted Answer

Read the whole verse and the argument inverts. Paul is quoting Israel’s creed — “Hear, Israel: Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4), which in the Greek Bible Paul read says “The Lord our God is one Lord” — and distributing its two titles: “God” to the Father, “Lord” to Jesus, with all things from the one and through the other. Their page answers that “Lord” can be a human title, so this “one Lord” excludes the Father only from that role. But Paul is not paying Jesus a courtesy title; he is reciting the Shema, whose “one Lord” is Yahweh himself, two verses after insisting “there is no other God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:4). Paul has not subtracted Jesus from the Shema; he has included him inside it. That is why the apostles could hand Yahweh’s own verses to Jesus: “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13, from Joel 2:32) and “every knee should bow” (Philippians 2:10, from Isaiah 45:23) both land on Christ.

Question 2

Does John 17:3 — 'the only true God' — exclude Jesus?

Accepted Answer

The contrast in Jesus’ prayer is between the true God and every false one — and eternal life is to know the Father and “him whom you sent, Jesus Christ” (John 17:3), a pairing no prophet ever claimed. Two verses later the same prayer asks for “the glory which I had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5), though Yahweh says, “I will not give my glory to another” (Isaiah 42:8). Their page answers that the glory existed only in God’s foreknowledge; but Jesus says he “had” it, “with you,” not that God had planned it for him. And John closes his first letter naming Jesus Christ directly: “This is the true God and eternal life” (1 John 5:20). The verse they lead with sits two verses from the verse that answers them.

Question 3

Is the Word of John 1 just God's plan?

Accepted Answer

Follow what John says the Word does: the Word “was God”; “All things were made through him”; “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world didn’t recognize him”; and “The Word became flesh and lived among us. We saw his glory” (John 1:1-3, 10, 14). Plans do not create worlds, go unrecognized in them, or take on flesh that can be seen. Jesus speaks the same way of himself: “I have come down from heaven” (John 6:38); “I came from the Father and have come into the world” (John 16:28); “glorify me with your own self with the glory which I had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5). A figurative preexistence cannot remember its glory.

Question 4

“Before Abraham came into existence, I AM” — just a way of identifying himself?

Accepted Answer

Common self-identification does not get a man stoned. The crowd reached for rocks because the grammar was a claim: Jesus did not say that he had existed before Abraham, but “before Abraham came into existence, I AM” (John 8:58) — timeless being set against Abraham’s coming to be. The blind man’s “I am he” (John 9:9) answered a question about who he was; Jesus’ “I AM” answered a question about his age (“You are not yet fifty years old!”) by claiming to exist before Abraham. John builds the theme deliberately: “unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins” (John 8:24); “when it happens, you may believe that I am he” (John 13:19) — the very words Yahweh speaks in Isaiah: “that you may know and believe me, and understand that I am he. Before me there was no God formed” (Isaiah 43:10). And when he says “I am he” in the garden, the arresting party “went backward and fell to the ground” (John 18:6). Ordinary identification does not do that either.

Question 5

Did the Son of God begin at his conception?

Accepted Answer

Luke 1:35 explains the origin of the Son’s humanity, not of his person. Micah had already said the Bethlehem Ruler’s “goings out are from of old, from ancient times” (Micah 5:2) — “from everlasting,” as the KJV renders it. Jesus describes his own arrival in words no merely conceived man could use: “I came from the Father and have come into the world” (John 16:28). Paul gives the order of events: “existing in the form of God,” he “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6-7). “God sent out his Son, born to a woman” (Galatians 4:4): the sending precedes the birth. The manger is where the eternal Son took our flesh — not where he started to exist.

Question 6

Is the Holy Spirit only God's power?

Accepted Answer

Scripture keeps speaking of the Spirit as someone distinct from the Father. Ananias lied to him — “You haven’t lied to men, but to God” (Acts 5:4). He can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30). He speaks in the first person: “Separate Barnabas and Saul for me, for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2). He hears and guides — “when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, he will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13) — and distributes gifts “as he desires” (1 Corinthians 12:11). The Father sends him (John 14:26), and while he intercedes for us, the Father “who searches the hearts knows what is on the Spirit’s mind” (Romans 8:27) — one who knows another’s mind is not that other. And Jesus names the Spirit beside the Father and the Son within one name: “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).

Question 7

Does 'the man Christ Jesus' rule out his deity?

Accepted Answer

Paul did say it — two letters over: “our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). The mediator text proves what it states: a go-between for God and men must truly stand with men, which is why “he was obligated in all things to be made like his brothers” (Hebrews 2:17). His full humanity is not the unitarian’s discovery; it is the church’s confession — the question was never whether Christ is man, but whether the man is also more. The same Paul who wrote “the man Christ Jesus” wrote that in him “all the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9).

Question 8

God cannot die or be tempted — so Jesus is not God?

Accepted Answer

The apostles walked straight into this “contradiction” and wrote it down as gospel: they “killed the Prince of life” (Acts 3:15); the rulers “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8); God purchased his assembly “with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). The answer is the incarnation the syllogism leaves out: the Son shared in flesh and blood precisely “that through death he might bring to nothing him who had the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14). He died in the humanity he assumed — which is the whole point of having assumed it — and was tempted in that same humanity, “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), while his deity remained what James says God is: “God can’t be tempted by evil” (James 1:13). Deny that the one who died is the Lord of glory, and the cross loses the very weight that saves.

Question 9

Was the Trinity invented at Nicaea?

Accepted Answer

Date the evidence. Early in the second century, Ignatius of Antioch — bishop of a church founded in the apostles’ own generation — wrote of “Jesus Christ, our God” and that “our God, Jesus Christ, was … conceived in the womb by Mary,” while being taken to Rome to die. Thomas’s confession is earlier still: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). The apostles baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19), and Paul blessed his readers with the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s love, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:14). What is fourth-century is a word, homoousios, adopted because Arians had learned to sign every purely biblical phrase while meaning something else. Concede the history honestly: the church spent centuries finding adequate language — but worship of Jesus as God is there in the first generation, in the prayers, hymns, and martyrdoms, long before any emperor cared.

Question 10

Do Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1 call Jesus God?

Accepted Answer

Peter settles his own grammar. “our God and Savior, Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:1) is built exactly like “our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:11) — in Greek one article, two titles joined by “and,” one name — and every reader on every side takes 1:11 as one person; the same construction recurs at 2:20 and 3:18. To split 1:1 into two persons while reading 1:11 as one is not grammar; it is necessity. Their page reads Titus 2:13 as the appearing of God’s glory, which is Jesus; but in Paul’s letters to Timothy the “appearing” is always Christ’s (1 Timothy 6:14; 2 Timothy 1:10; 4:1, 8), and the natural reading names him as the great God and Savior who appears. Granville Sharp listed both verses among the examples of his rule in 1798; the Greek has not changed since.

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