Justified True Belief

(P1) Whatever was made or rules by another's appointment is not God. + Scripture never counts gods by taking a census of spiritual beings. It draws a single line through everything that exists, and the word "God" names which side of that line a thing stands on. (1) Scripture cuts reality in two: the maker and the made. - The Bible's first sentence puts God on one side and everything else on the other: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). - Nehemiah says the same thing as an inventory, and he is careful to leave nothing off it. Heaven and its host, the earth, the seas, "and you preserve all of them" (Nehemiah 9:6). - Paul can name both sides in a single phrase. Idolatry, he says, is worshipping "the creature rather than the Creator" (Romans 1:25). Two categories, and no third. - Think of it this way. A carpenter and a chair are not two grades of furniture. Sand it, stain it, set it behind a velvet rope in a museum, and no amount of polish moves it across to the carpenter's side. (2) Israel's prophets ran this test on the neighbors' gods. - Isaiah walks his reader through a workshop. A man plants a tree and the rain feeds it. Years later he cuts it down, burns half of it to warm himself and bake his bread, carves what is left into a figure, and bows to the figure (Isaiah 44:14-17). The test is not subtle. He made it. - Jeremiah puts the standard in one sentence: "The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens" (Jeremiah 10:11). As it happens, that is the only verse in his book written in Aramaic, the international language of the day, as though it had been drafted to be quoted abroad. - Israel's hymns run the same test and reach the same verdict: "All the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the LORD made the heavens" (Psalm 96:5). (3) The same test was standard in Jesus' day. - The centuries around Jesus have a name: Second Temple Judaism, after the temple standing in Jerusalem then, the replacement for the one Babylon burned. The period runs from the return from that exile in the sixth century BC to that temple's own destruction by Roman troops in AD 70, about six hundred years. - Across those centuries Jewish writers drew a bright line between God and everything else, and they drew it with two questions. Who made all things? Who rules all things? Whatever else exists, however exalted, stands on the far side. - So the bar for a second God is high and clear. A second God would have to be distinct from God, uncreated, and sovereign in his own right rather than by appointment. Anything less is a creature with a good job. • Ruling by another's appointment means holding an office somebody else handed over and can take back. A deputy carries the sheriff's authority for as long as the sheriff leaves the badge with him, and authority you can be relieved of was never your own. (4) The surrounding gods flunked the test in their own stories. - In the Babylonian creation epic the gods have parents and birthdays. Marduk, who ends up on top, is born generations after the first pair of waters and wins his throne in a fight. - The Greek poet Hesiod has Zeus born to Cronus and Rhea and taking the sky by overthrowing his father, which means there was a time when Zeus did not rule and somebody else did. - A Babylonian would not have argued the point. His gods had origins, he knew it, and his own sacred story is where he learned it. What Israel claimed is that its God has none. Therefore, "God" is not the title of the strongest being in a crowded field, but the name of the one who made the field.

(P2) Everything other than the LORD is made and ruled by him. + That leaves a question of fact rather than a question of definition. Is there anything at all on God's side of that line besides the LORD? (1) Scripture denies a second God in every direction at once. - Where an English Bible prints "the LORD" in capital letters, the Hebrew underneath has God's own personal name, four consonants that Jews came to treat as too holy to say out loud. The name tells you which God is meant, and it says nothing whatever about how many persons that God is. Those are two different counts. - "I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God" (Isaiah 45:5). Deuteronomy says it twice inside a single chapter: "the LORD is God; there is no other besides him" (Deuteronomy 4:35, 39). - The sweep runs backward and forward through time as well as across space: "before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me" (Isaiah 43:10). - One line carries the whole premise: "I am the LORD, who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the earth by myself" (Isaiah 44:24). Alone, and by myself. Ancient kings liked to credit a patron god with the heavy lifting, and this one reports having had no help at all. (2) The exalted figures of Jewish literature sort into two kinds. - Some are creatures of high rank: the archangel Michael, or an ancestor out of Genesis like Enoch, who walks with God and is taken up. High, and made. - Others are not separate figures at all, but God's own: his Word, his Wisdom, his Spirit, his Name, his Glory. Proverbs pictures Wisdom as a woman calling out in the street and pleading with the people going past (Proverbs 1:20-21). The picture is vivid, and she is still God's wisdom rather than God's colleague. • The distinction is one you already use every day. When you say that a man's word is good, you have not introduced a second man into the conversation. His word is his own, and it goes where he sends it. - Neither kind crosses the line, because neither one supplies what a second God would need: something distinct from God, uncreated, and sovereign in its own right. (3) The gods of the divine council are creatures. - Psalm 82 opens on a scene: "God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment." The divine council is the heavenly assembly Scripture pictures around God, the way a court surrounds a king. - Then the scene turns. God charges these beings with judging unjustly, with favoring the wicked and failing the fatherless, and he passes sentence on them: "like men you shall die, and fall like any prince" (Psalm 82:7). - A being who can be sentenced is not on God's side of the line. What the psalm gives us is a courtroom, and only one figure in the room is the judge. • It is not a group portrait of a pantheon, meaning the whole set of gods a people worships together, the way Greece had Zeus and Athena and Poseidon with a temple for each. - The Hebrew word behind "gods" here is elohim, and it says what sort of thing is being spoken of rather than how high that thing stands. Scripture uses it of the God of Israel, of the gods of the nations (1 Kings 11:33), of spirits, and once of the ghost of Samuel called up at Endor (1 Samuel 28:13). (4) Every other authority in Scripture holds its power on loan. - Daniel's refrain in the Babylonian court is that "the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will" (Daniel 4:17). The book then demonstrates it on the most powerful man alive. Nebuchadnezzar ends up outdoors eating grass until he says the line himself. - Jesus tells the governor holding his life exactly the same thing: "You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above" (John 19:11). - Paul puts the invisible powers on the created list by name, "thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities," and adds that all of them "were created through him and for him" (Colossians 1:16). Therefore, every candidate for a second God turns out to be either something God made or something God is.

(C1) Therefore, the LORD alone is God. + Put (P1) and (P2) side by side and there is no room left for a second God. (1) A second God is ruled out. - Anything offered as a second God comes in one of two conditions. Either it was made, which fails the test in (P1), or it holds its authority from someone who handed the office over, which fails the same test. And (P2) says that everything other than the LORD is one or the other. - The premises are the claims an argument is built from, and in deductive reasoning they work like the links of a chain: if every link holds, the conclusion cannot slip out at the bottom. That standard is gentler than it sounds, because a premise does not have to be certain beyond all dispute. It only has to be more plausible than its denial. - Strictly, what (P1) and (P2) deliver is that there is at most one God. That there is at least one is a separate claim with separate evidence, argued from the world rather than from the text: from a universe that began, from a universe that did not have to exist at all, from a moral law nobody remembers writing. • Think of a parking space painted for one car. That the space holds at most one car is one fact about it. That a car is sitting in it right now is a different fact, and you have to walk out and look. - Put the two halves together, at most one and at least one, and the count comes out exact. (2) The count is of Gods, not of persons. - Ask a first-century Jew how many Gods there are and he has the answer ready before you finish the question. Ask him how many persons that one God is and you would get a puzzled look, because nobody in his world was asking. - Those are two different questions, and answering one leaves the other wide open. How many divine beings there are is what (P1) and (P2) settle. How many persons the one God is has its own evidence and its own answer. • A person, in this sense, is someone who can say "I" and be addressed as "you": someone who knows, loves, speaks, and acts. Counting persons is simply not the same operation as counting beings. - So a confession that says "one" is telling you how many Gods there are to worship. It is not telling you how many persons that one God is. (3) Some familiar proposals fall immediately. - Two divine beings, however unequal, are ruled out. A junior God is still a second God, and a second God is one too many. - Three divine beings fall the same way. Three cooperating deities, however unanimous they may be, add up to a pantheon with good manners. What (P1) and (P2) build is a fence rather than a full doctrine of God, and there is exactly one name standing inside it. See also: NT / Cosmological: The Kalam Argument NT / Cosmological: Leibniz' Contingency Argument

(P3) Worship belongs to the LORD alone. + The command is the rule, and Israel's practice is where you can watch the rule being kept. A confession can be tidied up by a later editor, but a habit of worship is much harder to revise, because it is a practice and practices leave marks. (1) Worship is where the first commandment starts. - "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:2-3). Before the laws about killing and theft and false witness, this one. - The reason God gives is possessive rather than philosophical: "my glory I give to no other" (Isaiah 42:8). He does not argue that worshipping others is inefficient or confused. He says the glory is his. (2) No Jewish group of the period worshipped a second figure in its gatherings. - What matters here is not what Jewish writers speculated about in their books but what Jewish congregations actually did when they assembled: the sacrifices, the prayers, the hymns, the calling on a name. All of it went to one. - Where a figure does get exalted in the literature, worship is refused, and sometimes it is refused in the same scene. In Revelation, John falls at the feet of the angel who has been showing him everything, and he gets one of the sharpest lines in the book: "You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God" (Revelation 19:10). It happens a second time a few chapters later, as though once had not been enough (Revelation 22:8-9). - Tobit, a Jewish story written well before Christianity, does exactly the same thing. Raphael has traveled with the family and healed the father's eyes, and when they want to thank him he tells them to bless God instead, and explains that he was sent (Tobit 12:16-20). (3) They paid real prices to hold the line. - Pilate had the army's standards carried into Jerusalem by night, the tall poles with the emperor's image on them. A crowd went down to Caesarea and lay in the open around his house for five days. On the sixth he seated himself on the tribunal, ringed them with soldiers, and threatened to cut them down. They bared their necks instead, and Pilate had the standards removed (Josephus, Jewish War 2.169-174). - Honoring the emperor was ordinary civic duty across the empire, and the Jews were formally excused from it. What they offered in its place was a sacrifice twice a day in their own temple for the emperor, and never to him (Against Apion 2.77). - When the emperor Caligula ordered his own statue installed in the temple, the governor of Syria met crowds who told him they would rather be killed, and he stalled the order until Caligula was assassinated in AD 41. (4) Jesus took the same line. - Tempted with the kingdoms of the world, he answers out of Deuteronomy: "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve" (Matthew 4:10). - Asked which commandment is first of all, he starts where every Jewish child started, with the confession Israel recited morning and evening, the Shema: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Mark 12:29). Therefore, the line Israel drew in its confession is the line it kept in its worship, under pressure, for centuries.

(P4) The first Christians confessed the one God of Israel. + If any group in that world had a motive to renegotiate the count, it was this one. The count never moved. (1) They state it flatly, in the middle of arguing about something else. - Settling a quarrel about whether it is all right to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols, Paul drops the claim in passing on his way to the real subject: "there is no God but one" (1 Corinthians 8:4). A claim you can use without defending it is a claim your readers already hold. - The same claim anchors his letters wherever unity is at stake: "one God and Father of all" (Ephesians 4:6), and "there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men" (1 Timothy 2:5). - James can even make a joke of it, with a sting in the tail: "You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!" (James 2:19). The confession is settled enough that a letter can rib its readers with it and expect them to laugh. (2) They led with it when they preached to pagans. - In Athens, surrounded by altars and statues, the message opens with the Creator: "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything" (Acts 17:24-25). - Paul can describe the conversion of an entire church in a single clause. They "turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God" (1 Thessalonians 1:9). Not added the true God to the shelf. Turned from. (3) They paid the same price Israel paid, for the same reason. - Refusing a city's gods was a public act with public consequences. Christians were tried as atheoi, atheists, because they denied the gods everybody else acknowledged. When Polycarp, an elderly bishop, was brought into the stadium at Smyrna in the middle of the second century, the crowd shouted that word at him, and then they burned him. - A pinch of incense would have ended the trial and sent him home. That was the whole test, and he refused it for the reason a Jew would have refused it. (4) The one step they did take, they took inside the count. - Writing to Corinth, a city he describes as full of "many gods and many lords," Paul recites Israel's confession with the Father and Jesus Christ inside it: "yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Corinthians 8:6). - Notice the arithmetic he does not do. He never writes two. He takes the confession's own two words, God and Lord, hands one to the Father and one to Jesus, and leaves the number exactly where Israel had it. Therefore, the church did not add a God to Israel's confession but announced the God Israel already had.

(C2) Therefore, there is exactly one God. + One God made everything, one God rules in his own right, and one God may be worshipped. All three descriptions turn out to fit the same one: sole Creator, sole Ruler, sole recipient of worship. (1) Three tests return the same answer. - Who made everything? One did, and everything else stands on the made side of the line (P1, P2). - Who rules in his own right rather than by somebody's appointment? One does, and every other authority in Scripture holds an office that was handed to it and can be taken back (P2). - Who may be worshipped? One, by command and in practice (P3), and the church that came afterward kept the same answer rather than adding to it (P4). - These are not three separate claims that happen to agree with each other. They are one line drawn three different ways, and Scripture reaches for whichever version the situation calls for. - Strictly, all four premises together deliver no more than one God. That there is one at all comes from the arguments named at (C1). (2) Several familiar accounts of God fall outside the fence. - The two-God and three-God proposals are already out (C1). So is a senior God with juniors beneath him. So is a divine committee, and so is any arrangement that shares worship around. - Also outside is any account of Father, Son, and Spirit that ends up counting three beings. Whatever that would be, it would not be the God of Israel's confession. - Inside the fence is where a Christian doctrine of God has to be built, and the people who built it knew that perfectly well. (3) The number of persons is a separate question. - The fence fixes how many Gods there are. It does not fix how many persons the one God is, because a count of beings is not a count of persons (C1). - So the question left standing is the interesting one. Is the one God of Israel Father, Son, and Spirit? That is argued from the New Testament's own evidence, and it is a separate argument. The doctrine of the Trinity makes two claims: that God is one, and that this one God is Father, Son, and Spirit. The first of them is not a Christian innovation at all. It is Israel's confession, carried over without amendment, and any account of God that loosens it has already failed. See also: PT / The Trinity: One God in Three Persons