Is Jesus God? Part 12: "In Our Image"

 Trinitarian Christianity claims that who God is is 3 male persons in 1, all fully God. Yet God says His image in Genesis 1-2 is male and female, 2 persons in 1, when God created Adam and Eve. Genesis 1:26-28 says,

^26” Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

I do not argue (and this is different than biblical unitarians, who believe the Father alone is God and not the Holy Spirit) that God is not a multi-person God. Multi-personhood speaks to a God who is Love (1 John 4:8), for how can true Love exist in 1 person? However, God from the beginning says His image is not only male, but female too. Absent from the Trinity is any sort of female person, though the Holy Spirit could be defined as such biblically. That topic and claim is discussed in section 2, "The Holy Spirit: God the Mother".  I believe that the Bible reveals a God who is 2 in 1, 2 persons, God the Father and God the Mother, the Holy Spirit, and this is explained in section 2 using the Bible, early Christian history, the witness of creation, and logic.

It is still important to mention this briefly in this section as further proof that the Trinity is not true. The Trinity shows God to be all male, and God has shown from the beginning this is not who God is.  Something feminine is inherent to who God is. The absence of any sort of femininity in the Godhead should be a warning sign for Christians that something is off. Logically, if God says His image is male and female in Genesis, He cannot only be defined in masculine terms.

If suggesting this makes you feel uncomfortable: why? Is that uncomfortableness rooted in God’s truth or in your own experience? Is it blasphemous to consider that part of who God is could be defined as feminine? If you believe, as most Christians do, that both men and women are equally created in the image of God and together, not apart, image God, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that God encompasses both masculinity and femininity? And, if so, to recognize that a 3-person male Godhead does not show this?

When I first considered this, I felt uncomfortable, but I realized that this feeling was due to my own personal experience, beliefs, and bias, not because of anything I had read in God’s Word. To give an example, God’s Spirit is also called the Spirit of Wisdom (Isaiah 11:2), who is described explicitly as feminine, with feminine pronouns, in the Wisdom literature of the Bible. The Spirit of Wisdom in the Wisdom literature is not simply personification of an inanimate object, as is commonly interpreted, as the Spirit of Wisdom is a living entity like God Himself. This same Spirit, which we know is the same as Ephesians 4:4-6 says there is one Spirit, gives birth to us as Christians (John 3:6), a decidedly female characteristic. What is more, all the male pronouns used in the New Testament to describe the Holy Spirit could be legitimately translated as female, “she”, “her”, etc.

Given this brief synopsis, one may ask: why was the Bible translated the way that it was and why has God’s image been defined as exclusively male, when the Bible explicitly shows God’s image to encompass masculinity and femininity? Why is the truth that the Holy Spirit is explicitly, not implicitly, revealed as feminine in the Bible in the Wisdom literature largely ignored?  Historical evidence shows that many in the early Church, including Jesus, believed the Holy Spirit to be Mother. While history is not the deciding factor on biblical truth, it is helpful in understanding the context at the time the Bible was written and can be helpful in accurately interpreting the Bible.

Christians agree that both men and women equally represent and reflect who God is.  Given this, did the Holy Spirit guide the Church to define God as 3 male persons in 1 in the 4^th century?

No. The Holy Spirit is the “Spirit of truth” (John 14:17), and only speaks and guides in truth. It was some other spirit guiding those councils to define as God as 3 male persons in 1. Moreover, if the Holy Spirit was not guiding the Council of Nicaea which was heavily influenced by the non-Christian Constantine, Satan, the father of lies (John 8:44) was involved. Satan is crafty. He takes what is true and twists it. There is truth in the Nicene Creed, but it is twisted. Satan does not try to sell the Church a lie that is all lie. That would be too obvious. So, the Church councils of the 4^th century defined God as 3 male persons in 1, ignoring God’s words from the beginning in Genesis 1-2 that His image is both male and female and the great biblical evidence that Jesus is not God.

As an aside, if the Trinity Doctrine is so important that belief in it is necessary to the salvation of a person, why was God not explicitly clear on His triune nature, not only in the New Testament, but also in the Old? Jews certainly never believed, and to this day still do not believe, in a triune God. They believe in one God, who is Spirit not man. Jesus himself believed this, as the previous sections show.

Note: this oneness of God does not mean God cannot be 2 in 1. In fact, the Hebrew word for “one” used to say God is “one” in the Shema, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one," (Deuteronomy 6:4), is also used in Genesis 2:24 to say that Adam and Eve are “one”: the original image of God. However, there are no references or mentions in the entire Bible to God being “3 in 1” or even simply “3”, besides the arguments from inference used by Trinitarians.