If you grew up being told there is no Trinity, only Jesus, or if someone you love still believes that, this guide offers a way to study the question honestly and talk about it without a fight. The method is slow on purpose. You will read the key passages yourself. You will state the Oneness reading fairly and test both readings against what the text shows. Then you will practice a conversation built on questions rather than verdicts.
The model comes from Dr. Dennis Edwards, a pastor with a doctorate in biblical studies who was saved in a Oneness Pentecostal church in Queens, New York. He came to believe in the Trinity during college. No single argument did it. Months of Bible study with people who kept opening the text with him did. This guide tries to reproduce that experience, not the conclusion alone.
You can work through it alone with a notebook and a Bible, or with a group. It fits one long session or three shorter ones: the first two readings, then the fairness exercise, then the conversation practice. Some people in a group will have parents, pastors or close friends in Oneness churches. Nobody has to say so, and nobody should be asked.
Before you read: write down where you are starting
Take two minutes and write, in plain words, what you currently believe about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Then add one line about where you learned it. Keep this page. You will come back to it at the end.
Edwards describes his own starting point without embarrassment. In his childhood church, he says, “we were taught very strongly that there was no trinity.” He also says he “didn’t know there was even any other kind of thinking.” That second line matters. Most people hold the view they were handed, Trinitarian or not, and few have tested it. Writing your starting point down is a way of admitting that you, too, inherited something.
First reading: two baptism texts
Read these two verses aloud, slowly, and then read the chapters around them.
At Pentecost, Peter answers the crowd: “Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38).
Before his ascension, Jesus tells his disciples: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19).
Observe before you interpret. Mark every word that is singular and every word that is plural. Note who is speaking, who is listening, and what just happened in the story. In Acts 2, what has the crowd just been told about Jesus in the verses before verse 38? In Matthew 28, what does Jesus say about his own authority in the verse before verse 19?
Edwards explains how his church connected these verses. Jesus gave a command to baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Peter then baptized in the name of Jesus. So, the reasoning went, Peter must have understood that Jesus himself is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Notice that this is an honest attempt to make two passages agree. It is not a refusal to read the Bible.
Now write down at least two possible explanations for why Peter names Jesus in Acts 2:38. One is the Oneness explanation you just read. Try to form at least one more from the context of Acts 2 itself. Do not choose between them yet.
One boundary for this exercise: faithful Christians, including Christians who affirm the Trinity, differ on the exact words to say at a baptism and on what baptism means. This guide does not settle those questions. The narrower question here is whether Acts 2:38 requires the Father, Son and Spirit to be one person.
What actually moved Edwards
Edwards does not credit a clever debater. He credits tools for reading. “This notion of having the right tools is a big deal to me,” he says, and he names it as one reason he pursued a doctorate. He remembers teachers who announced what the Greek said “but never gave me guidance on how I could find that out myself.”
That complaint changes how you should approach the rest of this guide. Someone who only trades one set of confident teachers for another has not learned to read. They have switched loyalties. Edwards wanted ordinary church members to receive good teaching and also to “get taught how to study the text themselves.” The aim is to be able to check a claim, including a claim you like.
Here is one small example of what a tool looks like. The KJV includes a verse at 1 John 5:7 that names the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost as one. Its support in the earliest manuscripts is debated, so a careful student of the Trinity does not rest the doctrine on that verse alone. Knowing that makes your case more honest, not weaker. The passages in this guide carry the weight without it.
Edwards’s own change was gradual. He checked with his pastor before joining a campus Bible study. “I remember checking with my pastor to make sure he was okay to be in this Bible study,” he says, and the pastor agreed. At the study he found people who saw the Holy Spirit differently, and he admits “they probably looked at me as a heretic.” By his sophomore year he reached a modest conclusion: “maybe there is a different way to understand this.” He later left his childhood church because he needed room to keep learning, not because he needed an enemy.
Lisa Fields adds a confession that applies to anyone getting good at this: “The more knowledge I got, the more arrogant I became early on.” The KJV puts the warning this way: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1). Keep that verse nearby while you study, because the next exercises will give you more knowledge.
Second reading: who is talking to whom?
Edwards says that with a Oneness friend he would point to places where “there’s a distinction between the father, son, and spirit” and then ask how they would account for them. Do that work yourself first.
For each passage below, write three short lines: who is speaking, who is being addressed, and who is being spoken about.
- Matthew 3:16-17, the baptism of Jesus, where the Son comes up from the water, the Spirit descends like a dove, and a voice from heaven speaks.
- John 14:16: “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.”
- John 17:5: “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.”
- John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Now read a second set that stresses God’s oneness and the unity of Jesus with the Father: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4). “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30). And from John 14:9, Jesus says, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”
Both sets are Scripture, and an honest reading has to hold all of them. The Trinitarian claim is not that there are three Gods. Jude 3 teaches that God is one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, co-equal and co-eternal. Ask which reading explains both sets of passages with the least strain. Then ask the harder question: what would you have to find in the text to change your mind?
Edwards gives a test you can run on your own prayers. He notes that people sometimes thank the Father for dying on the cross, and he points out that “the father didn’t hang on the cross.” He does not mock them. “They have this earnestness,” he says. For the next few days, notice whom you address when you pray and what you thank each one for. The point is not to police anyone’s prayers. It is to see that the doctrine shapes how you understand the cross itself.
State the other reading until a Oneness believer would agree
This is the exercise most people skip, and it is the one that keeps a conversation from becoming a fight. Write one paragraph explaining the Oneness view of God and Acts 2:38 in its best form. Use what Edwards described. The standard is high: a sincere Oneness believer should be able to read your paragraph and say, yes, that is what I believe and why.
If you are in a group, pair up and trade paragraphs. Each partner marks any sentence that sounds like a caricature, a motive judgment, or a word the other side would never use. Revise once. Then answer one question in writing: what does the Oneness reading get right about God that you want to keep saying clearly?
Lisa Fields explains why this matters. She warns against taking someone back to Sabellianism, an ancient teaching close to the Oneness view, and announcing that a church council already ruled on it, because a person with no frame of reference for that history will not be moved. She favors “this whole method of self-discovery through reading the scriptures.” She also offers the charitable starting point: “people aren’t intentionally being heretics. They just don’t have the tools and they weren’t taught the tools.”
Practicing the conversation
Edwards describes his approach plainly. He would make a biblical case through questions and “try to get folks back to the scriptures.” He believes confusion can be a gift: “sometimes when you get to a quagmire, you get to a place where you’re not sure that’s when you are most teachable.” He adds that this is the moment “you’re willing to open yourself to what God might be showing you there.”
Try a five-minute practice with a partner. One person speaks as someone raised in a Oneness church, using the fair paragraph from the last exercise as a guide. That person should not act out a stereotype. The other person may only ask questions about the text, drawn from the passages in the second reading. No statements, no corrections, no history lessons. Then switch roles.
Afterward, talk about three things. Which question opened the text rather than cornered the person? When did you want to start arguing, and what triggered it? If you were the one being asked, which question would you keep thinking about later?
Facilitators should watch for two drifts. One is toward debate, where the questioner starts scoring points. The other is toward avoidance, where everyone stays so polite that the real difference never comes up. Edwards names both. On the first: “if we come at everything as a battle, I don’t think that we are really doing service to the gospel.” On the second, he observes that “the higher value maybe of some kind of collegiality trumps our theology at times,” though he grants that “sometimes that opens up a door for us to have further conversation.”
Be realistic too. Edwards says plainly, “Not everyone will have ears to hear,” and that “people would need to be open to being taught.” A slow conversation is not a guarantee. It is a refusal to treat everyone as closed before you have even asked a question.
Jude asks believers to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). Edwards notes that “our fighting for the faith may look different in different contexts.” Lisa Fields puts the balance in one line: “We have to contend for the faith without being contentious.”
Questions for discussion or private reflection
- Look back at the starting point you wrote down. Did any passage in this guide strengthen it, unsettle it, or leave it the same? Point to the specific verse.
- After reading Acts 2 in context, which explanation for Peter’s words accounts for more of the chapter? What would someone holding the other explanation say in reply?
- Which passage in the second reading was hardest to fit with your current view, and why?
- Edwards changed his mind over about two years, with people who kept studying alongside him. What does that suggest about how much one conversation can carry?
- Where do you rely on a teacher’s claim that you have never checked yourself? What tool would let you check it?
- In the practice conversation, what was the difference between a question that opened the text and a question that was really an argument in disguise?
A question to carry
Years later, Edwards met a group of students at a Christian college who came from churches like the one he grew up in. He prayed with them and encouraged them “to soak up what they were teaching and try to expand their mind.” He did not tell them to despise where they came from.
Before your next real conversation on this subject, reread the paragraph you wrote stating the Oneness view. Ask yourself whether the person you are about to talk with would recognize themselves in it. If not, the study is not finished yet.