Oneness Pentecostalism & The Eternal Son’s Prayer

Oneness Pentecostalism teaches that the Son is only the Father manifested in human flesh. John 17 contradicts it: the Son is there before creation, holding glory alongside the Father, and loved by Him from eternity.

Clarifying Terms

Classical Trinitarianism holds one God undivided in essence while eternally existing in three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Spirit. The mystery of the one in three and three in one. Each divine person is called God (1 Peter 1:3, John 1:1, Acts 5:3–4), operates with different, yet inseparable, roles in salvation (Ephesians 1:3–4, 7, 13–14), and together are a unified authority, properly the name, as God (Matthew 28:19).

The Trinity was taught by our Lord, the apostles, and the early church. Nevertheless, different errors in theology proper, doctrines of God’s nature, have spread at every point of church history. While today there are several non-Trinitarian groups that often get lumped together in apologetics, they exist in one of two frameworks.

Unitarianism

Unitarianism holds one God exists while denying Jesus has any ontological connection as God. Rather, to them, Jesus is a uniquely commissioned man or perhaps divine creature. Unitarian Universalists, Christadelphians, and Jehovah’s Witnesses fall into the Unitarian category.

Oneness

Then, Oneness theology argues one “unipersonal” God exists as the Father in the manifestation as the Son with emanation through the Spirit.¹ The largest denomination today holding Oneness theology is the United Pentecostal Church International, led by its General Superintendent Dr. David K. Bernard.

They are similar to historic modalism, popularized by Sabellius (c. 220 AD), in that they think of God existing in three modes – except the ancient heretics thought in successions: God was Father under the Law, Son in redemption, and is now Spirit in believers. On the other hand, Oneness theology thinks of God in three simultaneous manifestations of Himself.² Thus, Bernard has no issue with the Father speaking to Jesus from Heaven at His baptism (Matthew 3:16–17). He is, after all, omnipresent (Psalm 139:7–10).

This article explains how the Oneness position fails to match the Biblical evidence and especially cannot account for John 17.

Oneness’ Jesus

In Oneness Pentecostalism, Jesus is the one true God who is the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit in their totality.³ Most Oneness theologians compare the appearance of distinctions to Jesus having a divine and human nature while still remaining one person. So also, the different manifestations of God do not create differing identities.

However, Bernard would not say the Father is the Son. Rather, the Father refers to deity while the Son is deity indwelt in humanity. Then, “Son of God” began with the miraculous conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb.⁴ In Oneness theology, the sonship of Jesus refers to His divine parentage, not any eternal generation or unique preexistent relationship (John 1:18, μονογενής).

God, in their view, can answer prayers through manifestations of the Father (John 16:23), the Son (Acts 7:59), or the Spirit (Romans 8:26–27). But rather strangely, Bernard explains that Son can pray to the Father because His humanity spoke to His divine Spirit (the Father) indwelling Him. The human flesh was weak and faced real temptations, needing the Father’s aid.⁵ Citing Luke 22:42, they argue the limited human mind of the Son, the will of Christ, had to align with the infinite divine Mind, the Father.

While those explanations themselves feel strained, they cannot account for statements in the Lord’s High Priestly Prayer. John 17 clearly depicts the Son speaking to the Father as a distinct person while equally divine.

The High Priestly Prayer

It seems natural enough that prayer, as a form of communication, involves a unique sender and recipient. John 17 begins with Christ petitioning to be glorified so that He may glorify the Father. Here the Lord speaks of the glory in His resurrection that would follow the hour of suffering. His humiliation and death are the means of the Father’s glorification.⁶ One person, a unipersonal being, alone cannot coherently be said to request of Himself an opportunity for glorifying Himself.

The submission of Christ as a humble servant allowed for the Father’s display of glory. In fact, Isaiah 53:10 gives another similar distinction; the Lord was pleased to crush the Messiah, being fully satisfied in His atonement. Additionally, John 12:41 narrates that Jesus is the preexistent Lord, the sacred name YHWH, who spoke in Isaiah 6.

In John 17:5, Jesus prayed for yet another glory, one He held with the Father before the world was. Meanwhile, God says in Isaiah 42:8 that He never gives His glory to another. Therefore, Jesus, as God the Son, has the same glory innately in Himself as the Father and yet addresses the Father as one person to another. They have a unity with distinction.

Bernard’s Solution to John 17:5

Again, David Bernard tries to resolve the problem by arguing that the man Jesus prayed to the eternal Spirit of God. God, or the divine indwelt in Christ, did not need help but the frail humanity did require aid. If Jesus as God did pray to God the Father, Bernard thinks this implies subordination or a form of Arianism where one person is inferior to the other. As for the preexistence of Christ stated in John 17, he argues the Son existed eternally as a plan in the mind of God the Father.⁷

Grammatical Problems with Conceptual Glory

The humanity of Christ never possessed glory with the Father before the world existed. In the Oneness position, Jesus is asking for the return of something He never had to begin with in the first place. And, if the Son is the Father without distinction, then He also cannot be said to have lost anything.

Biblically speaking, God the Son accepted limitations of humanity in growing in wisdom (Luke 2:52), hungering and thirsting (Matthew 4:2), and ultimately emptying Himself as a servant by submitting unto death (Philippians 2:6–7). At no point, however, did Jesus become less divine or inferior to God the Father. Praying to the Father does not imply subordination in essence.

The Greek grammar in John 17:5 clearly speaks of a continuing past action that applied to the speaker that is alongside the one He addresses. Simply put, “the glory which I had” (τῇ δόξῃ ᾗ εἶχον) uses the first-person imperfect, a durative past tense, meaning closer to “I was having”. If the Son existed as a plan or concept in the Father’s mind, the personal pronouns with the verb tense would not fit.

Furthermore, the clause “together with yourself” uses the preposition παρά with the reflexive dative, placing the speaker at the Father’s own side. The Father’s forethought would not stand alongside Himself.

Glory Given to the Disciples

As John 17 continues, Jesus prays not only for the apostles but for all who would believe through them, which includes believers today. Specifically, in 17:22 Jesus implores that believers would be unified as He is with the Father. The glory which the Father had given the Son is shared by believers through Christ indwelling them.

The passage distinguishes the two glories. The earlier glory was one the Son had before creation with the Father and requested again. Yet, the glory in the later end of the prayer is one currently possessed by the speaker in connection with His redemptive mission in the world. Believers cannot share in a glory tied with divine essence, but we do share a relational union with Christ by being made children of God (John 1:12–13, Galatians 3:26). By living as fellow children united in purpose through love we demonstrate the same love of the Father to the Son. Of course, believers reflect this glory while not being all bodily joined in a unipersonal being.

John 17:24 states the Father loved the Son before creation, meaning they have an immutable, mutual, and personal relationship. Love requires both a giver and a receiver, establishing an eternal distinction of persons within the Godhead.

Love is an action word from one to another, and yet within the Trinity it exists outside of the created order. From the eternal past, before the foundations of the world, the Son is forever loved by the Father.

Bernard’s Solution to John 17:20–24

Bernard, representing the predominant Oneness position, concedes that the Father loves the Son – but as a future manifestation of Himself foreseen from eternity past in His mind.⁸ Grammatically the Greek construction in John 17:24 is identical to 1 Peter 1:20 (πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου), where the KJV uses foreordained.

Grammatical Problems with Impersonal Love

The problem with Bernard’s assertion is John 17 uses love as a verb (ἀγαπάω) towards an active person receiving it. You can have foreknowledge of an event, which God certainly did in the purpose of the crucifixion, but having an active love for a person before creation requires that person. On the Oneness reading, before the Son existed in reality, the Father would have loved only the concept of Him. Love for an abstract thought cannot fit personal pronouns of “I” from 17:5 and “me” of 17:24. Plans do not have agency to know and receive love while existing themselves as merely projected ideas.

Refuting Philosophical Arguments

Outside of addressing the Biblical text, Bernard makes a few side arguments from a philosophical angle.⁹ First, he argues that the Trinitarian conclusion has trouble avoiding polytheism. This ignores the standard distinction between being and person. The three are distinguished by their relations to one another — the Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds — which tells us who they are. Yet they are one in substance, nature, essence, and attributes, which tells us what they are, in an undivided simplicity. Polytheism, by contrast, has separate beings, each with its own nature and its own will, often in conflict with each other.

Next, Bernard accuses the Trinitarian answer to John 17 of making God a self-loving being. This ignores the textual distinction of persons, but moreover it would not be the model presented for believers in John 17:23–26. If the Church has unity together, they demonstrate God’s love. Clearly, our Lord did not intend us to become spiritually perfected and thereby witness to the world through self-love!

Finally, Bernard thinks it strange some passages that implicitly teach the Trinity, like John 17, leave out the Holy Spirit. Shifting the burden of proof and throwing a whataboutism does not address the text and resolve its contradiction to Oneness theology.

The Trinity is derived systematically by carefully examining all of Scripture. For the Holy Spirit, the reader can look just earlier in the same discourse to John 15:26. The Son promised to send the Counselor from the Father, as the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father and bears witness of the Son.

The Colossians Parallel

Colossians 1:13–17 provides the same distinction. Paul prays that the readers might walk worthy of the Lord, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified them for eternal rewards (1:10–12). We have such opportunities because He, that is the Father, has delivered us from the power of darkness into the Kingdom belonging to His beloved Son. Literally, the text reads in Greek “the Son of His love” (τοῦ υἱοῦ τῆς ἀγάπης αὐτοῦ).

Paul then describes the Son preexisting creation with preeminence over it. The subject is never renamed after verse 13, providing a single chain about the Son. Creation being made “In Him… through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16: ἐν αὐτῷ, δι’ αὐτοῦ, and εἰς αὐτόν) cannot describe a foreknown idea or plan, but best describe a person distinct from the Father who Himself has always held the universe together.

Bernard compares the case to saying President Lincoln was born in Kentucky, though Lincoln was not president in Kentucky.¹⁰ However, that only appears to work because Lincoln was existing alive at his birth, not as an intangible concept in someone else’s mind.

Confused Person Becomes Confusing Salvation

Someone does not need a perfect theology proper to understand the hope of eternal life offered by faith in Christ. The danger, however, is presenting a confusing gospel narrative that will, I believe, cloud someone’s confidence in Jesus and the integrity of the message.

For example, in John 5:18–23 Jesus defended His authority to heal on the Sabbath because He alone has the authority to judge everyone, the living and the dead. The Father delegated this authority because He, the Son, perfectly obeys Him. People who honor Jesus are honoring the Father who sent Him. The language assumes distinction and equality, something the Jews well understood!

Moreover, Jesus can grant eternal life because the same life exists in Himself. You cannot give what you do not rightfully possess in yourself. The conclusion of Jesus’ logical argument is the promise of John 5:24. The same framing is repeated in John 17:2, where Jesus’ prayer reiterates that He is given authority over all flesh and thus has the privileges to give eternal life.

Conclusion

If the evangelist is not clear about the identity of Jesus, they risk their audience believing Jesus, if taken at His word, is insane or a liar. The hostile Jews likewise misunderstood Jesus’ claims and echoed the same wrong conclusion in John 10:20.

The distinction of the Son as the only one who perfectly honors and obeys the Father makes clear He will keep His promise and He is able to fulfill it. The Oneness Pentecostal position muddles the Godhead distinctions Scripture makes abundantly clear. Our mission must be to clear the way to the message of eternal life by eliminating roadblocks of all possible confusion.

John 17:3 tells us that the gift of eternal life is that we may know the Father, the only true God and His Son whom He sent. Interpreted as the Oneness reading, the Son is the Father’s own manifestation, and He would be asking us to know God, and to know God whom God sent, Himself. Someone hearing the gospel will not likely believe a promise from someone they cannot logically follow.

For the clarity of the reader, we ought to teach we are loved by the Father in the same way as He loves the Son. The prayer of John 17 is itself an argument for our assurance, and it rests on the distinction within the Godhead. The grounds for our assurance, in this context, is stripped away by Oneness theology.

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