The old charge that the Bible doesn’t say that God is a Trinity, and that Trinitarians therefore can’t define the Trinity using biblical terms, has been posted again on the Facebook page for ex-members of Community Chapel, the defunct Oneness Pentecostal church to which I used to belong. This has of course been answered at length multiple times in multiple ways by myself and others, but I will answer it again here on this site for the sake of those who may have an interest in the topic (and duplicating, more or less, a post I made earlier today on my own Website about Community Chapel and its issues, though I may expand my remarks here on this site later).

The best answer is that this charge is just flat wrong on the surface. The Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is all over the Bible and is easily defined using only biblical terms: the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there is only one God. This is why the apostles were told in Matthew 28:19, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Which of these terms is not Biblical? Anti-Trinitarians have their proof-texts that they say show the Son is not God or the Holy Spirit is not God, but that claimed meaning doesn’t hold up when all passages that speak to their identity are examined together and all are accounted as equally true. On the other hand, if they say that three cannot be one, that it’s a logical contradiction, then they are making God and His Word subordinate to human experience and reasoning. The end result in either case is that they have to discard the plain meaning of some parts of Scripture in order to maintain their various kinds of “Oneness” doctrine. But the meaning of the parts we’re supposed to keep is different depending on who you’re talking to.

One therefore also has to smile at the irony of this charge. As I have observed elsewhere (“Unitarian Babel”), those who say the Bible doesn’t show us the Trinity cannot even agree among themselves on who the Bible shows Jesus to be.