If you were raised to believe there is no Trinity, only Jesus, then doubting that teaching can feel like doubting the people who brought you to faith. Dr. Dennis Edwards’s story points to another path. He grew up in a Oneness Pentecostal church and came to believe in the Trinity by studying Scripture slowly, alongside people who took the text seriously. He left that church still able to speak of it with respect. What changed his mind was better tools for reading the Bible.
Edwards has stood on both sides of this question. He was once the young believer whose inherited answers started to wobble. He later became the pastor and New Testament scholar trying to help people still inside the movement he came from.
What does “Jesus only” actually teach?
Edwards grew up attending a small storefront church in Queens, New York. He describes a teaching that was confident and repeated often: “we were taught very strongly that there was no trinity.” The doctrine was something to be suspicious of, and in his words, “it was a Catholic thing.”
The center of gravity was one verse. Edwards recalls that every sermon ended with an altar call that came back to Acts 2:38. In the KJV, Peter tells the crowd at Pentecost, “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). His church read this as a formula: repent, be baptized, receive the Holy Ghost, with speaking in tongues as the evidence.
The argument ran like this, as Edwards explains it. In the Great Commission, Jesus told the disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. A short time later, at Pentecost, Peter baptizes in the name of Jesus. So Peter must have understood that Jesus is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Edwards sums up where that lands: “So there’s only Jesus, Jesus only.” The movement even used that phrase as a nickname for itself.
Notice what kind of reasoning this is. It is an attempt to make two passages fit together, and it settles the tension by concluding that Father, Son and Spirit are titles for one person. That helps explain why honest study reached Edwards when mockery would not have. The teaching was built from Scripture, so the response had to come from Scripture too.
Why does questioning it feel like betraying people you love?
For many people, the doctrine and the community arrive as one package. The pastor who baptized you, the saints who prayed over you and the teaching about God’s nature all come together. If one piece is wrong, it can feel as if all of them were lying.
Edwards separates those pieces carefully, and that distinction is what makes his story useful. He describes his childhood church as sincere: “the church in my childhood, very much thought that they were giving their best effort at understanding the scriptures, even though it didn’t line up with orthodox teaching.” He also names a flaw: “as with a lot of churches, there was an air of self-righteousness, but it wasn’t born out of that particular doctrine.” He criticizes exactly what deserves criticism and stops there.
His pastor even gave him permission to keep learning. When a campus ministry invited Edwards to a Bible study in college, he checked first. “I remember checking with my pastor to make sure he was okay to be in this Bible study.” The pastor said yes. Edwards draws the conclusion plainly: “So there was nothing malicious or cultic in that regard.”
Lisa Fields, founder of Jude 3 Project, warns against the opposite assumption, that people raised in Oneness churches are spreading error on purpose. Her diagnosis is simpler: “people aren’t intentionally being heretics. They just don’t have the tools and they weren’t taught the tools.”
This frees the person who is questioning. You can conclude that a teaching is mistaken while still believing the people who taught it were honest. The belief can change while gratitude stays.
How did the change actually happen?
Slowly, and with a good deal of confusion along the way. At the campus Bible study, Edwards says, “I was surprised to find how many people thought differently about the Holy Spirit.” He knew the surprise ran both directions: “they probably looked at me as a heretic.” He kept attending anyway.
At one point his campus minister brought in the campus director to focus on Edwards in the study. He did not understand why at the time. Only about a year later did he realize they had been trying to help him see God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit differently. Their effort made sense to him only in hindsight.
By his sophomore year, he says, he “kind of yielded.” The words he uses for that moment are modest: “maybe there is a different way to understand this.” That is how someone talks after being given enough room and enough Scripture to see a second possibility, and finally admitting it.
Edwards did eventually leave his childhood church, and he is specific about why. It was “mostly because people were not of the mindset to change their theological views.” What he needed was this: “I needed to be in a place where I could be exposed to a broader range of theological teaching.” He left to keep growing, and he still speaks of the people he left with respect.
What does Scripture put on the table?
If the Oneness position stands on Acts 2:38, the Trinitarian response has to deal with that verse honestly. It says what it says. Peter does call people to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.
The question is how that verse sits next to Matthew 28:19, where Jesus says, “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). Jesus speaks of “the name,” singular, and then names three. Many Christian interpreters read “in the name of Jesus” in Acts as identifying whose authority the baptism belongs to and whom the convert is turning toward. On that reading, the two passages fit together. One describes a public turning to the risen Jesus at Pentecost. The other reveals that the single name into which believers are baptized belongs to Father, Son and Spirit. Christians still differ on the exact words to use at a baptism and on what baptism means. Those are real questions, and they are separate from the question of who God is.
Edwards does not start with a proof text when he talks with Oneness believers. He says he would make a biblical case for the Trinity by raising questions, pointing to places where Scripture shows a distinction between the Father, the Son and the Spirit, then asking how they would deal with that. His goal is to “try to get folks back to the scriptures.”
The baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3:16-17 is one such place. The Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends like a dove, and a voice from heaven calls him the beloved Son. All three appear in the same moment, and the voice speaks about the Son as someone other than itself. If Father, Son and Spirit were one person showing up in different roles, this scene would require that person to stand in the river, descend on himself and speak from heaven about himself, all at once. John 14:16 raises the same question in Jesus’s own words: he will pray to the Father, and the Father will give the disciples another Comforter. Three are named, and they relate to one another.
Edwards gives an example of how much this distinction matters, even in churches that affirm the Trinity. He notes that people sometimes pray to the Father and thank him for dying on the cross. He calls it what it technically is, because “the father didn’t hang on the cross.” He has no interest in embarrassing earnest people who pray that way. His point is that the Trinity shapes how we understand the cross itself, which is why Jude 3 holds one God in three persons as essential Christian doctrine rather than a matter of vocabulary.
Why doesn’t a knockout argument work?
Here is the strongest objection to Edwards’s patient approach. The early church already settled this question. Why not show someone that the view was condemned long ago and save everyone time?
Fields answers that directly. Taking someone back to Sabellianism, an ancient teaching close to the Oneness view, and pointing out that a church council already ruled on it, will do little for a person with no frame of reference for any of that. The history is true. It persuades only someone who already trusts the people telling it. She argues that self-discovery through reading the Scriptures helps more than fighting people on every doctrine.
Edwards’s history explains why he agrees. “this notion of having the right tools is a big deal to me. I think it’s one reason why I pursued a doctorate in the first place.” He describes himself as someone who would “soak up whatever was being taught,” and he remembers teachers who would “sort of arrogantly throw out, well, in the Greek it says this or this means that.” What frustrated him was the dead end: they “never gave me guidance on how I could find that out myself.” He wanted regular church members to receive good theological teaching and also to “get taught how to study the text themselves.”
Patience has limits, and Edwards admits them. He mentions people from another non-Trinitarian group who knock on his door with a mindset that he cannot tell them anything. “Not everyone will have ears to hear,” he says, and people “would need to be open to being taught.” His approach simply refuses to treat everyone as resistant before anyone has spoken. In his words, “if we come at everything as a battle, I don’t think that we are really doing service to the gospel.” He also observes that a desire for collegiality sometimes trumps theology. That can open doors, but it can also leave a real difference unspoken.
Jude urges believers to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). Edwards affirms that fight while noting that “our fighting for the faith may look different in different contexts.” Fields states the posture in one line: “We have to contend for the faith without being contentious.”
For the person who is questioning now, Edwards offers a reassuring observation about confusion: “when you get to a quagmire, you get to a place where you’re not sure that’s when you are most teachable.” Uncertainty can be the most honest place you have stood in a while. When he met a group of young men from churches like his own at a Christian college, he prayed with them, traded names from those same churches, and urged them forward: “I encouraged them to soak up what they were teaching and try to expand their mind.”
That advice points to the real hinge of his story. Read the passages yourself and ask who is speaking to whom. Find people who will open the text with you and teachers who show their work. An argument from authority asks you to trade one set of teachers for another, and you are left trusting whoever spoke last. Tools let you test both sets of teachers against the same Bible. That is how Edwards changed his mind without trading one loyalty for another, and it is why he could leave the church that raised him and still honor it.