Thursday, July 08, 2021

Michael Heiser on Trinitarianism


Michael S. Heiser is an American biblical Old Testament scholar and popular author, with an interest in the spiritual realm, namely the Divine Council in the Bible.

In a recent talk he gave entitled “Was the Trinity Made Up By The Council of Nicea?”,[1] he responded to New Testament scholar and popular author Bart Ehrman, who wrote the blog article “Nope. Jesus is Not Yahweh.”[2] What follows is a transcript of what Heiser said. I take this subject of theology and divine identity extremely seriously. I closely and objectively scrutinize all arguments for Trinitarianism that I encounter. Gullibility has no place here. Thus, if Heiser can present a compelling case for a three-in-one God that respects the ransom sacrifice and the purity of the virgin birth, then I will gladly join forces with him. If he fails at this, however, I will show where his arguments collapse.

Heiser is very loquacious here, so I will underline where he gets to main points worthy of close, sober and objective scrutiny. I wanted to include the entire context of what he said. It appears that this starts somewhere near the end of his talk:
We want to loop the Holy Spirit into this, from the Old Testament. This is Isaiah 63. This is a little encapsulation of the wandering of the Jews to the promised land. And in verse 10, Isaiah makes the comment about his people that “they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit.” I mean, we know the story of Israel going through the desert, the wilderness, I mean, they complain all the time, you’ve got all these episodes where God wants to judge them. And Moses intercedes, and God says, you know, okay, I’m going to be long-suffering again, and, you know, so on and so forth. But there’s this one particular incident where this language is used; “they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit.” If you look up the parallel, which is longer in Psalm 78, where you get sort of a whole litany of things that happen. Look at the language here; there’s a reference to the Most High God in verse 35. And you keep reading down here, and you get the same language. The reason I have these colorized [in his slide] is that “rebelled” is the same word [Psalm 78:40, 41]. In both passages, the same Hebrew word. “Grieved” is the same Hebrew word in both passages. But the object is different. In Isaiah 63, they rebel and grieve against the Holy Spirit. And here they rebel and grieve. And the object [in Psalm 78:35] is God, the Holy One of Israel.
Reply:
The NET Bible has this footnote for “his Holy Spirit”: “The phrase ‘holy Spirit’ occurs in the OT only here (in v. 11 as well) and in Ps 51:11 (51:13 HT), where it is associated with the divine presence.” The “divine presence” is not a person but the presence of God. Psalm 51:11 NET Bible has “your Holy Spirit” with a footnote noting “The personal Spirit of God is mentioned frequently in the OT, but only here and in Isa 63:10-11 is he called ‘your/his holy Spirit.’” Thus, the holy spirit is a projection of God. By rebelling within it, they grieve Him and by extension can be said to grieve His projection. It does not mean it is another person.
Now we could read elsewhere in this passage, the angel actually shows up in Psalm 78. The point is that God and the Spirit are interchanged. Both things are God, just as God and the angel were interchanged in other passages. They’re both God.
Reply:
The angel being interchanged for God is easily explained as the angel representing God as His ambassador. But Heiser likely has in mind Genesis 48:15-16 (NWT) which parallels “true God” with “angel.” However, this is moot as the NET Bible notes for “angel”:
Jacob closely associates God with an angelic protective presence. This does not mean that Jacob viewed his God as a mere angel, but it does suggest that he was aware of an angelic presence sent by God to protect him. Here he so closely associates the two that they become virtually indistinguishable. In this culture messengers typically carried the authority of the one who sent them and could even be addressed as such. Perhaps Jacob thought that the divine blessing would be mediated through this angelic messenger. (underscore added)
Thus, if anything, the angel could be called “true God” (NWT) representationally and not ontologically, as Jesus confirmed in John 17:3 with his Father being the “only true God.”
Different ways of saying and referring to God. Now, this is important for when you get to the New Testament. And here’s where I really wanted angle for today. If you think about what’s going on in the Old Testament, you have two Yahweh figures that are prominent.
Reply:
You have Yahweh the Father and God (in accords with divine revelation seen in Deuteronomy 32:6, Isaiah 63:16, 64:8, Jeremiah 31:9, Psalm 89:26 and Malachi 2:10, which all in one way or another identify God or Yahweh as the Father), and you have his personified divine presence as well as his angelic ambassador.
Yes, the Holy Spirit is also referred to as God, we just saw that, but I want to focus on the two. You have Yahweh invisible and transcendent, then you have Yahweh as a man, okay. And you have the Spirit in here too. They’re all connected, they’re all referred to as God, they’re all identified with God in someplace.

The two are more prominent than the Spirit is, at least in terms of an explicit sense. But just as the angel, think about this, the middle circle here [in his slide], just as the angel was God, but also wasn’t the same person. I mean, he’s not, he is, but isn’t God, He is God. But yet God’s still up there in heaven and transcendent. He’s not like when the angel who is God is on Earth, that doesn’t mean God is only there. God’s still everywhere, you know, you get this sort of language, again, the same difficulty that we have talking about the Trinity. But just as the angel was, but wasn’t Yahweh. So, if we put Jesus here, it’s the same struggle, the same language, Jesus was, but wasn’t God.
Reply:
It seems to me that he is adding Jesus to his confusion of OT theology. If Jesus is still God, then he never died for our sins and his ransom sacrifice is a sham. It is a shame the celebrated and Einstein-like Dr. Heiser never addressed this glaring problem of astronomical magnitude, for the ransom sacrifice is what defines Christianity.
But Jesus also is connected to and identified with the Spirit. So you have an analogy here, just look where the bubbles [in his slide] are. Yahweh God, the Father, same person. The embodied God as man in the Old Testament aligns with Jesus and then the Spirit. Because we don’t realize, and here are the list of passages. [Acts 16:6-7 HS=“Spirit of Jesus” (Phil 1:19); Rom 8:9 Spirit of God=“Spirit of Christ” (1 Pet 1:11); Gal 4:6—God sent “Spirit of his Son” into our hearts]
Reply:
Or, Jesus is now privileged upon his resurrection by God to use God’s holy projection of the divine presence. This would actually support the utilitarian nature of the holy spirit.
There are several places where the Spirit of Jesus or the Spirit of Christ is in the text parallel to the Spirit of God. There are a couple of places where in 2 Corinthians 3:18, for instance, where Paul refers to Jesus, he says “The Lord Who is the Spirit,” but we know that Jesus wasn’t the Spirit, but is the spirit but he’s not. The Spirit is Jesus, but he isn’t. They’re independent, but the same. Again, this is where the Trinitarian struggle really comes from. And its antecedent is the Old Testament.
Reply:
2 Corinthians 3:18 may actually be referring to the Father there, as the NWT has: “by Jehovah the Spirit.” It has a footnote offering the alternate less-likely “by the spirit of Jehovah.” Heiser possibly also had in mind the previous verse, which has “Now the Lord [or Jehovah, NWT] is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” (WEB) This is more easily and naturally explained as the divine presence being from God, where there is freedom. It’s not a person, but a domain to dwell in. That it must be the divine presence is the fact that Mary became pregnant by the holy spirit. (Matthew 1:18; Luke 1:35) If it was a person, then her status of a virgin becomes contentious. It is amazing that the erudite Dr. Heiser missed this crucial detail that defines the Christian faith!
Jesus is the central figure linking both Testaments and linking with both the Father and the Spirit. This is where Trinitarian theology comes from. Not from proof texts like the Great Commission, even though those are important, they echo the point. But the theology of it comes from the Old Testament. Two Yahwehs, actually three because the Spirit again is identified with God who is also the angel. Again, you get this three-in-one language in the Old Testament, and you get it in the New Testament. So this is the antecedent.

And the payoffs for us today are the Godhead concepts are rooted in the Old Testament. They’re applied to Jesus in the New Testament.

The Payoff
  • Godhead concepts—specifically, a second Yahweh figure—are rooted in the Old Testament
  • Old Testament Godhead conceptions (the “second Yahweh”) are applied to Jesus in the NT.
  • The applications of these conceptions to Jesus provide the basis and strategy to articulate Trinitarianism.
This is where Trinitarianism comes from.
Reply:
It comes from overcomplicating simple things and unwittingly denying the virgin birth and ransom sacrifice?
And this makes certain passages coherent. (John 8:58 and Gal 3:8) “Before Abraham was I am”, Jesus says, yeah. If you know your Old Testament, you know how the visible Yahweh in human form connects to Jesus. Yeah, Jesus can say that.
Reply:
Actually, Trinitarianism makes John 8:58 exceedingly incoherent for demanding that Jesus was uncouth before the authorities. For his preferred translation of John 8:58 to make sense, more Greek words are needed, as in “Before Abraham was, I existed as the I am.” This is clearly seen if we replace “I am” with another designation, like “Lord”: “Before Abraham was Lord.” This clearly makes no sense at all, and placing this uncouth response on the lips of Jesus is absolutely absurd and disrespectful. Instead, by dispensing with the Trinitarian mindset, a much better translation would be: “I have been in existence since before Abraham was born.” (McKay)
The Gospel that was preached before unto Abraham (Galatians). Yeah, it’s the Abrahamic covenant. Okay. I mean, we understand this.
Reply:
Heiser never explained why he thinks Trinitarianism is required for Galatians 3:8 to be coherent. The scripture explains how the “good news” or “gospel” was declared to Abraham in the last sentence. No Trinitarianism required. What a disaster for Heiser!
You know, you have people like Bart Ehrman, and these other Jesus mythers, and Ehrman is not a Jesus myther. But I’m using Ehrman because of his criticism of Christology. And Jesus mythers are just sort of ultra-ignorant at this point, claiming that this theology of Christianity was invented by later church councils basically out of thin air, and that New Testament attestations to Jesus’s deity were written late, just added arbitrarily. Both of those ideas show a deep profound ignorance of the Old Testament. The antecedent for all of this.
Reply:
So, everyone who denies the Trinity are ultra-ignorant agnostic skeptics or Jesus mythers. And he says this after forgetting about the ransom sacrifice and the virgin birth, two historical and defining doctrines of Christianity, and after dishonoring himself over John 8:58 and Galatians 3:8. This is really embarrassing for him! Can the Trinity be true then? After listening to and examining Heiser’s lecture, the resounding answer is an emphatic No! This is a horrible disaster that exposes Trinitarianism as a deeply confused misrepresentation of Biblical theology that must have arisen during a dark age in Christianity—as seen in the Council of Nicea, as the historian Socrates Scholasticus described the controversy of this time as a “battle in the dark.”

Two other things I noted:
  • Heiser switched from “his Holy Spirit” to “the Holy Spirit,” probably due to his preconceived belief that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinitarian Godhead.
  • In Trinitarianism, the three persons are not each other (ie., Jesus is not the Holy Spirit), yet Heiser said “Jesus also is connected to and identified with the Spirit.” “The Spirit … is also the angel.” This contradiction is absolutely devastating to his presentation.


Footnotes:
[1] From Facebook: www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3666266056802414, February 15, 2021. Slides referred to are seen here.
[2] The Bart Ehrman Blog, April 17, 2021. ehrmanblog.org/nope-jesus-is-not-yahweh

See also:




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posted by JimSpace at 5:06 PM