The Godhead vs. the Trinity — What the New Testament Actually Says

The Nicene Creed was written in 325 AD. The New Testament was written in the first century. They do not describe the same God.

Two Doctrines That Get Confused

Before anything else, a distinction that most of this argument gets wrong on both sides.

Ask an ordinary churchgoer to explain the Trinity and you will usually get the ice-water-steam answer: one God who shows up in three modes, Father on Monday, Son on Tuesday, Spirit on Wednesday. That is NOT the Trinity. It has its own name — modalism, or Sabellianism — and the same tradition that produced the creeds condemned it as heresy well before Nicaea.

The actual Nicene doctrine says something harder: one indivisible divine substance subsisting eternally and simultaneously as three genuinely distinct persons, none of whom is either of the others. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. All three are the one God.

Why does this matter so much here? Because a large share of the arguments LDS apologists throw at Trinitarians actually land on modalism — a doctrine the Trinitarian already rejects. Aim at the wrong target and you hand your opponent the reply. Everything below aims at the right one: the word substance.

What the Creed Actually Claims

Read the Creed of Nicaea on its own terms:

The Creed of Nicaea, A.D. 325

“And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.”

That phrase — one substance — is the load-bearing claim. In Greek it is homoousios. Where does homoousios appear in the New Testament?

It does not. The word is a term of Greek philosophy, drawn from the vocabulary of ousia that Plato and Aristotle had built and that later Greek thought carried forward. It had circulated among Gnostic writers, and a synod at Antioch had already handled it warily in the previous century. At Nicaea it was pressed into service to resolve the Arian controversy — a dispute over whether the Son was co-eternal with the Father or subordinate to him.

The later creeds tightened the screws. Constantinople in 381 settled the personhood of the Holy Ghost, which Nicaea had barely addressed. Chalcedon in 451 defined two natures in one person. And the Athanasian Creed, the fullest statement of all, opens by making assent to the formula a condition of salvation, then adds a line worth holding onto: “in this Trinity none is afore or after another; none is greater or less than another.”

The Strongest Form of the Trinitarian Argument

An argument is only worth as much as the version of the other side it answers. So here is the Trinitarian case at full strength, without trimming.

The Case for One Substance

  • Deuteronomy 6:4 — “The Lord our God is one Lord.” Israel’s confession leaves no room for a second God.
  • Isaiah 44:6 — “beside me there is no God.”
  • John 1:1 — the Word was with God and was God, in one sentence.
  • John 10:30 — “I and my Father are one.”
  • John 14:9 — “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”
  • Colossians 2:9 — “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”
  • Hebrews 1:3 — the Son is “the express image of his person.”
  • Matthew 28:19 — baptism into the singular name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Every verse there is scripture, and Latter-day Saints affirm every one of them. Christ is fully God. He is the Creator. He is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, and he was divine long before Bethlehem. Nothing in the Restoration lowers him by a degree.

So what is missing from that list? The word substance. NOT ONE of those passages says that the three share a single indivisible essence, and none of them reaches for the vocabulary of essence at all, which is precisely the vocabulary a council would later insist the passages had meant all along. They say one, they say fulness, they say image. The whole question is whether the machinery fits.

One — And the Greek Tells You Which Kind

Everything hangs on John 10:30. “I and my Father are one.” One what?

The Greek answers plainly. The word is hen — neuter. Not heis, the masculine form that would say one person. Neuter means one thing, one reality, one purpose. If John had meant that the Father and the Son are a single individual, the word for it was available and he passed it over.

Does that construction turn up anywhere else? It does, and the parallel is decisive. Paul writes of himself and Apollos: “he that planteth and he that watereth are one” (1 Corinthians 3:8). Identical neuter, two men, no shared essence. Nobody has ever read that verse as a metaphysical claim about Paul and Apollos.

Then Christ himself defines the term, on his last night:

John 17:20–23

“Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one.”

Same neuter hen, applied to the disciples. And the standard of comparison is stated outright: even as we are one. Run the creed through that sentence and Christ is asking that eleven Galileans be merged into one divine essence with each other and with God. No Trinitarian believes that, and no Trinitarian should.

The trained reply is that the comparison is analogical rather than exact — the Greek kathos means like our unity, not identical to it. That reply is legitimate, and it deserves to be met rather than mocked.

But count the cost of it. The single passage where Christ explains what his oneness with the Father is like must be read as not quite meaning what it says — in order to defend a term that appears nowhere in scripture. Which is the greater strain on the text? Read the prayer with no formula to protect and it is not obscure at all: unity of will, mind, love, and glory, of a kind that can be extended to disciples. That is precisely why he was praying for it.

What the Witnesses Reported

Here the honest apologist has to be careful, because two favorite arguments do less than they are usually asked to do.

At the baptism, the Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends as a dove, and the Father speaks from heaven (Matthew 3:16–17). In Gethsemane the Son prays, “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). Do those scenes refute the Trinity? No. They refute modalism, and they refute it completely — but a Trinitarian holds three distinct persons and cites Matthew 3 as his own proof text. Prayer from one person to another is exactly what the creed permits.

What those scenes do establish is the shape of the evidence. The witnesses report located, distinguishable beings who speak to one another. Stephen makes it concrete:

Acts 7:55–56

“But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.”

Two figures, one positioned at the right hand of the other. Peter describes the ascended Christ the same way, “by the right hand of God exalted” (Acts 2:33), and both are reaching for Psalm 110:1.

Now set the Athanasian line beside the sayings it has to absorb. None is greater or less than another — against “my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). The Son does not know the hour of his own return, and the Father does (Mark 13:32). The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he sees the Father do (John 5:19). After the resurrection, with mortality behind him, he still says “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17).

The risen Christ has a God. Whose?

Two verses on the Trinitarian list even lean the other way when pressed. Paul says the fulness of the Godhead dwells in Christ bodily — somatikos (Colossians 2:9), an odd adverb for a being without form. And Hebrews calls the Son the express image of the Father’s person (Hebrews 1:3). An image requires an original. That is two, not one.

The History the Formula Rests On

Arius of Alexandria taught that the Son was a distinct and subordinate being — “there was a time when the Son was not.” That was no fringe eccentricity. It commanded wide support across the eastern churches and kept it for decades after Nicaea condemned it. Origen had already taught a subordinate Son in the previous century.

Constantine convened the council in 325 because the empire needed one Christianity, not two. Roughly three hundred bishops attended; Athanasius later put the number at 318. In the end only two refused to sign — Theonas of Marmarica and Secundus of Ptolemais — and both were anathematized and exiled, as was Arius, whose books were burned. The dissent was small. But a formula that needs the machinery of an empire behind it is being enforced, not received.

What did the men in the room think they were doing? Eusebius of Caesarea wrote home to his congregation to explain his subscription, and the letter survives in Socrates Scholasticus. His own words: “nor do we cavil at the word homoousios, having regard to peace.” What reason does he give for accepting the formula? PEACE. He is not claiming a revelation and he is not citing a verse.

The decisive admission, though, comes from the creed’s greatest champion. Athanasius spent his life defending homoousios, and when opponents objected that the word was not scriptural, he did not deny it. He conceded it and argued the point anyway:

Athanasius, De Decretis

“Even if the expressions are not in so many words in the Scriptures, yet, as was said before, they contain the sense of the Scriptures.”

Read that carefully, because it concedes the entire structure of the argument. The council’s foremost defender agrees the vocabulary is not in the text. His claim is that it captures the sense of the text — an interpretive judgment made by bishops in council, three centuries after the apostles, in the middle of a political crisis.

The LDS reading of that period does not make those men fools or villains. They were doing the best that could be done with what remained to them: argument, philosophy, and a vote. What they did not have was anyone who could ask God and receive an answer, which is the one thing that would have settled the question in an afternoon instead of requiring a century of councils to hammer into shape. If the doctrine had been the plain and universal teaching of the apostles, why did settling it take an emperor at all?

The Verdict

The Godhead of the New Testament is three distinct beings — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost — perfectly united in purpose, will, and love. Three at the Jordan. Two in Stephen’s vision. A Son in Gethsemane surrendering a will that was genuinely his own to surrender. One God, in the sense the scriptures actually use the phrase.

The Nicene Trinity adds one Greek word to that picture, and the word changes everything. From the New Testament it is ABSENT. Its greatest defender admitted as much. It required an emperor to impose and generations to secure. And to keep it, the one passage in which Christ explains his own oneness with the Father has to be softened into an analogy.

So the question is not whether Latter-day Saint belief is biblical. The evidence above settles that. The question is whether homoousios is — and on that, Athanasius answered before we did.

Sources — Primary Texts

Sources — The Other Side, and Ours