Chapter 4. John 17:3 – The Only True God

In Part Two of this paper, we now re-evaluate the deity of Jesus Christ in the light of John’s Gospel. Because this is a confer­ence paper, we cannot cover every pass­age in John. We won’t follow the verse order in John’s Gospel, but will begin with John 17:3:

This statement comes from the mouth of the Lord Jesus. It is deep, yet clear and simple. There is noth­ing theolog­ically com­plex about it. Even if the mean­ing of “eternal” is vague to some, surely the vocabulary of the sen­tence as a whole is not beyond that of a primary school student.

What then is Jesus saying in John 17:3? Within one sentence, Jesus twice uses the pronoun “you” (which is singular in the Greek text) to address the One he is praying to. It is clear from verse 1 that Jesus is praying specifically to his Father: “Father, the hour has come, glorify your Son”. This fact is not debated by trinit­arians, and is stated in most commentaries. Hence Jesus is sim­ply saying, “You, Father, are the only true God,” a state­ment that rules out everyone else, in­cluding Jesus himself, as being God.

In addressing his Father as the only true God, Jesus is ruling out any other, even a so-called “god” or “God,” as true God. This is doubly rein­forced by the use of the article “the” and the adjective “only,” both of which, espec­ially in combinat­ion, imply strict exclus­ion. The triple emphasis (the+only+true) is a triple reject­ion of any divine person alongside the Father of Jesus Christ.

Similarly, in John 5:44, Jesus calls the Father “the only God,” a verse that is problematic to trinitarians, even some early trinitarians.[1]

Who then is the Father whom Jesus calls the only true God? He is none other than Yahweh Himself, the God of Israel, for who else can be “the only true God” (Jn.17:3) but Yahweh who is the only God (“I am Yahweh, and there is no other, besides me there is no God,” Isa.45:5)?

How could we in our trinitarian days have imagined that the Father is not the sole person in “the only true God”? Did we really think that Jesus was praying to all three persons of the Trinity, includ­ing Jesus himself? Does the word “you” (singular in Greek) which is uttered by Jesus in­clude “me” — Jesus him­self? Is Jesus pray­ing to himself? And what do we make of the words that follow, “and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”? Here Jesus is making a sharp distinction between “you” (the Father) and “Jesus Christ” by which he excludes himself from being “the only true God”.

The monotheism of John 17:3 is rock solid and defeats every attempt to give it a trinitarian meaning. That is why some Bible com­ment­aries avoid mentioning this verse altogether. Some other com­ment­aries quote the words “the only true God” for the sake of com­pleteness, but give them zero com­mentary. Yet others quote only the first part of John 17:3 which they find tame and inoffensive (“this is eternal life, that they may know you”), but are silent on the second part which they find object­ionable (“the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”). I have looked at two dozen trinitarian commentaries.

But a few trinitarians are so bold as to try to ex­plain away Jesus’ clear statement in John 17:3. Yet even the greatest minds in church history (e.g., Augustine) have failed to reverse the meaning of John 17:3. That is the clear proof of the strict and absolute mono­theism of John 17:3 and of Jesus Christ.

A common trinitarian tactic is to alter Jesus’ words in such a way as to expand the scope of “the only true God” to absorb Jesus or even the whole Trinity into the redefined “only true God”.

Augustine, after quoting John 17:3 correctly and accurately, goes on to change its word order in a way that absorbs Jesus into “the only true God”. The alteration is not an accidental slip because Augustine calls it “the proper order”. Then he does something similar for the Holy Spirit.

In the following paragraph from Augustine’s exposition of John’s gospel, his alteration of John 17:3 is highlighted in boldface:

In the first sentence, Augustine quotes John 17:3 accurately, but in the second sentence (in boldface), he moves “Jesus Christ” into juxtapo­sit­ion with the Father such that both consti­tute the only true God!

The fact that Augustine, a brilliant thinker, feels compelled to do this to John 17:3 is clear proof that this verse, in its unaltered form, does not sup­port the doctrine of the Trinity. His alteration of John 17:3 is all the more puzzling because he does quote the verse accur­ately in the first sen­tence, which means that he had access to a good text of John 17:3, not a corrupted text. John 17:3 has no textual issues, and is given zero commentary in UBS5’s critical apparatus.[3]

A similar but more subtle approach is seen in the article “Trin­ity” in ISBE (vol.5, pp.3012f) by B.B. War­field, a gifted writer who is known as “the last of the great Prince­ton theolo­gians”. From his ISBE article we see the sub­tle pro­cess by which Jesus’ words — and his strict mono­theism — are brushed aside by philosophi­cal soph­isti­ca­tion and the persuasive argumentat­ion from human wis­dom.

Only the first part of Warfield’s essay is quoted below. It is skill­fully pres­ented. First he admits what cannot be denied, namely, that trini­ta­rian lang­uage is unbiblical and derived from philoso­phy, while assert­ing that it is nonetheless Scriptural in essence. Using the language of chemistry, Warfield says that trini­tarian truth is the “crystalliza­tion” of what is hidden in Script­ure as a “solution” and in “solvent” state. While con­ceding that the doctrine of the Trinity is an extrapolation from “frag­mentary allu­sions,” Warfield goes on to say that it is none­theless a “genuinely Script­ural doc­trine”.

Warfield gets bolder in the next paragraph and says that the Trin­ity is “indiscoverable” in Scripture and can only be known by revela­tion! By this clever argument, Warfield has trans­formed a glaring trinit­arian weak­ness (the lack of bibli­cal support) into a supposed strength, and the non-existent into something that is know­able only by trinitarian illumination!

For brevity we quote only the first paragraph of his essay. Notice how his non-Scripture position comes out, without exagger­at­ion, in al­most every sentence:

Warfield’s persistent non-use of Scripture to uphold trinit­ar­ian­ism comes close to an explicit admission that trinitarian doctrine is unscript­ural. He even says that it uses “un-Biblical lang­uage” and is “indiscoverable” in the Bible.

Notice further that Warfield defines trinitar­ianism as “the doctrine that there is one only and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons” (italics added). The words in italics are a direct reference to Jesus’ statement in John 17:3 in which Jesus declares that the Father is “the only true God”. But by failing to quote Jesus in full, Warfield is sidestepping the key word “you” which is singular in the Greek and refers to the Father only. In this verse, Jesus is not merely saying, “there is one true God,” but is saying specifically, “You (the Father) are the only true God”. Jesus is not making a vague or gen­eral state­ment about mono­theism but states specifically who the only true God is (namely, the Father).

The same fundamental error is made in the hymn, “We believe in One True God,” by Tobias Clausnitzer, 1668, and translated from the German by Catherine Winkworth, 1863. Whereas Jesus says that only the Father is true God (Jn.17:3), the first line of this hymn goes off on a tangent: “We believe in one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit”. Just as puzz­ling, the Bible verse given by a hymnbook as the bib­lical basis of this hymn is none other than John 17:3!

A similar error is seen in the title of a book by Clarence Benson: The One True God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It is this crucial fact — that Jesus addresses his Father as the only true God — which is suppressed in trinitarianism. The error then slides into a distortion of the word “monotheism” to make it mean something other than mono­theism, namely, that “in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and co­equal Persons” (War­field). But how can a doc­trine of a three-person Godhead be monotheism, the doctrine of one and only God?

But because the Father is the only true God, it will come as no sur­prise that it is almost impossible to find the deity of Jesus in the Bible. This leads us to the next chapter.