Sorry to jump the gun on next year/quarter, in Sabbath School, but it's online now, already, and there are issues listed in the lesson we need to sort out, so, why not start early.

Is this the best forum for this thread? I nearly put in Sabbath School.

Lesson #1 2012: The Triune God.

The lesson emphasises the deity of Christ and the divine personhood of the Holy Spirit - as if any serious Adventist would doubt the divinity of either. There are now well-known discussions in the church, and of course on here, on both issues, but is the challenge to the trinity "doctrine" taught among us, properly understood?

There are, it appears to me, to be at least two big problems in this lesson: one mistake, and one untruth - grave misrepresentation.

At the top of Monday's section: "Those who question the Trinity doctrine often challenge the deity of Christ." Well, not by the best "questioners" that I've seen among us, since Ellen White's death, and not by our early church as a whole, either, as it happens.

Also, in the Discussion Questions at the end of the lesson, the first words are: "Some early Adventists struggled with the doctrine of the Trinity. Today the church has taken a firm stand on the doctrine." "The church has taken", yes, but earlier the whole church rejected the doctrine, teaching yet the deity of the three Powers of heaven: Saying "some early Adventists" is gravely misrepresenting our history, and whoever allowed that must answer to her own conscience (Jo Ann Davidson wrote the lesson draft).

Since when has the Further Reading had but a quarter of the space reserved for Ellen White excerpts??? Check it out!! It's usually all SOP, to encourage us to study the Bible deeper. In fact, just looked again, and there isn't a single Ellen White quote anywhere else in the lesson, at all. Is there a difference between Ellen White and the lesson author on the nature of God?

See Sister White's statment's further below, which match the single, non-trinitarian quote from her in the lesson under "further reading", for in most of that quote in the lesson she says, in DA 19: "From the days of eternity the Lord Jesus Christ was one with the Father; He was ‘the image of God,’ the image of His greatness and majesty, ‘the outshining of His glory.’ It was to manifest this glory that He came to our world."

Since she also, generally in her writings, identifies Jesus as the only begotten Son of God from eternity, this DA 19 statement strongly suggests that 'from the days of eternity' (Mic 5:2, marg.) is a reference to the unknowable point in eternity hinted at also in Prov 8:22, etc, when the Word of God was begotten before creation began, as God's Son. See below, on that, too.

Why, then, did our early church resist this doctrine which now we hold as we suggest our pioneers as much as denied the deity of Christ and his eternal pre-existence? How did our church proclaim Christ's deity but not the trinitry doctrine?

It turned, not on numbers - 3 members of the Godhead, nor on eternal, divine pre-existence of Christ - for we believed that, too: it turned on whether God died for our sins on the cross of Calvary. It turned on the height of grace: the atoning sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

Now, the lesson says (on Thursday's) that "God Himself, in the Person of Christ" had to and did die for sin, to be a worthy sacrifice of the atonement: but, haven't you heard it preached among us that divinity cannot die but humanity died, in Christ's death? I certainly have, and this is a trinitarian argument preserving the trinity itself.

Basically, since that doctrine depends on Three Persons maintaining a threesome from eternity to eternity, the death of the Person called "God the Son" is out of the question else the trinity wouldn't survive salvation intact. Separated for a moment, by death - till resurrection, disrupts an eternity to eternity of existence for God. The trinity cannot be a duo..., for it must be a trinity!! The trinity doctrine's structure prevents salvation!....

Meantime, "God Himself, in the Person of Christ" is actually non-trinitarian wording, distinguishing "God the Father" from "the person of his Son" - that's Ellen White's wording, "the person of his Son". She also said that the "Author of life" suffered on the cross: according to SOP, the person whose eternal identity is the Son of God, having become a mortal man, died on the cross in human flesh, but, indeed, deity cannot die.

Listen carefully, now: God, in the person of his Son, died as the Son of man, the Lamb of God. Yet, this is possible, Biblically, only should the Father himself be the God refered to in the Bible as the him who is God, and the pre-incarnate Jesus is the eternal Son of his divine Father, God: yes, not a trinitarian God consisting mysteriously of three-in-one, but the individual, personally distinct God and Father of us all, including Jesus his divine Son.