Biblical monotheism

You may come to this page from different places. If you are a Latter-day Saint, you have been taught that Heavenly Father is an exalted man, and that his children can grow to become like him. If you are Jewish or Muslim, you hold that God is one without partner, and you may suspect that Christians gave that up. Jewish readers and Latter-day Saints accept these texts as Scripture. Muslims believe that God revealed the Torah to Moses, but do not necessarily accept the present Hebrew Bible as an independent authority. If you are Muslim, read the passages below as the Christian case from earlier texts, not as a standard you already accept. This page starts with those texts and then turns the same test on Christianity.

In Isaiah 43:10 the LORD speaks: “You are My witnesses… so that you may consider and believe Me and understand that I am He. Before Me no god was formed, and after Me none will come.” (“The LORD,” in small capitals in most English Bibles, stands for God’s personal name, YHWH.) A chapter later he says, “I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God but Me” (Isaiah 44:6), and in the next chapter he repeats that there is no other (Isaiah 45:5).

Isaiah is not saying “the LORD is the greatest god.” He does not place him at the top of a group. He denies that the group exists.

Isaiah’s word “formed” matters for the Latter-day Saint teaching about exaltation. The Church’s essay Becoming Like God teaches that the divine nature humans inherit can be developed to become like Heavenly Father’s, and Doctrine and Covenants 132:20 says of the faithful who are sealed in the temple, “Then shall they be gods.”

That hope speaks of love that lasts and of children growing to resemble their Father. Christians have their own language of glory: Peter says believers may become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), and Christians have always taught that the redeemed will be made like Christ. Both sides agree that God shares his life with his children.

The disagreement is over what they become. Isaiah says no god was formed before the LORD and none will come after him. A person who begins as a creature and later becomes a god of the same kind as the Father is a god formed after him. Peter, by contrast, explains his own phrase in the same verse: partaking of the divine nature goes with escaping the corruption that is in the world. It describes creatures made holy, who go on worshiping God, not creatures who become gods.

Israel’s daily confession, the Shema, begins: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The first commandment says, “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3).

In the Hebrew Bible, believing in one God is never only a statement about how many divine beings exist. It is about whom you worship. The prophets condemn idols because worship has been turned away from the one who alone deserves it, not because idols are powerful rivals.

If you are a Muslim, you will recognize this. Tawhid, the oneness of God, and the refusal of shirk, giving any partner to God, express the same conviction. If you are Jewish, you may have said the Shema all your life. Here Christians, Jews, and Muslims stand on the same ground: there is one God, and no one else may receive the worship that belongs to him.

Any teaching can be asked a concrete question. Does it leave worship where the LORD placed it, or does it move it toward a creature, whether a prophet, an angel, or a future glorified humanity?

The Torah expects that impressive new claims will arise, and it gives a test for them. “If a prophet or dreamer of dreams arises among you and proclaims a sign or wonder to you, and if the sign or wonder he has spoken to you comes about, but he says, ‘Let us follow other gods… and let us worship them,’ you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer” (Deuteronomy 13:1-3).

Moses imagines the hardest case: the sign really happens, and it still does not decide the question, because the test is where the message leads.

The rule is public, and it cuts every way. It applies to a later prophet who claims to be foretold in the Bible, to a new book of scripture, and to the Christian claims about Jesus. If Jesus were a creature and Christians worshiped him, Deuteronomy 13 would condemn them. Christianity has to face that question, and the last section of this page asks it. The wider test for prophets is set out in public revelation and prophetic tests.

You may have noticed that the Hebrew Bible sometimes speaks of other “gods.” Psalm 82 pictures God standing in a divine assembly and judging “the gods,” and Jesus quotes its words “You are gods” in John 10:34. If you are a Latter-day Saint, you may have heard these verses offered as evidence that humans can become gods. If you are Jewish, you may read them as a picture of God’s heavenly court.

Read the psalm to the end. The same “gods” are told that they will die like men and fall like any ruler (Psalm 82:7). Whether they are human judges or heavenly powers, they are under judgment, and they can die. They are not uncreated, they did not make the world, and no one is told to worship them.

The Hebrew Bible keeps this distinction throughout. Other beings may be called elohim, the Hebrew word for “gods” or mighty ones, but only one is the uncreated maker of all, and only one may be worshiped.

Christians say they believe in one God, and they mean it. Paul was a Jew trained as a Pharisee. In 1 Corinthians 8:6, writing to a city full of “many gods and many lords,” he restates the Shema: “there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came… And there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came.” Richard Bauckham, a New Testament scholar at the University of St Andrews, reads this as Paul placing Jesus inside the one God of Israel, not adding a second god beside him.

If you are Jewish or Muslim, you do not accept Paul’s letters as Scripture. Read them here as evidence of what the first Christians believed. Rather than abandoning the Shema, they were claiming that Jesus belongs on the Creator’s side of the line.

Whether that claim is true is a separate question, and this page does not settle it. It rests on what the earliest sources say about Jesus, set out in Jesus is God, and on how Father, Son, and Spirit can be one God, set out in the Trinity is monotheism. The standard for judging it is the one on this page. If Jesus were a creature, worshiping him would break the Shema, and Christians agree.