The Trinity and incarnation violate monotheism

Two words need defining. The Trinity is the Christian teaching that the one God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: three who are distinct from one another, sharing one divine being, not three gods. The incarnation is the teaching that the Son, without ceasing to be God, became a human being, Jesus of Nazareth.

Both teachings deny what you fear. They deny that there is a second god beside the LORD, and they deny that a man was raised up into divinity. Either of those would be idolatry, and Christians agree that Scripture forbids it.

The earliest evidence for the Christian claim comes from a Jew. Paul, who describes himself as a Pharisee trained in the Torah, wrote to Gentile believers in Corinth around AD 55. Surrounded by the “many gods and many lords” of a Greek city, he restated the Shema: “there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). He took the two key words of the Shema, God and Lord, and placed Jesus within the confession. The Christian scholar Richard Bauckham describes this as including Jesus in the identity of the one God, not adding a second. Larry Hurtado, also a Christian, argues that Jesus’ first Jewish followers worshiped him within a strict monotheism, while still reciting the Shema.

You need not accept that Paul was right. His letter shows that the claim began among Jews who held to the Shema, not among pagans who had given it up.

The Shema’s word is echad. Elsewhere echad describes a unity made of more than one part: a man and his wife become “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), and the spies carry back one cluster of grapes (Numbers 13:23). The word does not, by itself, describe the inner life of God as a single undivided point.

That should not be pushed too far. Echad does not prove any plurality in God, and Christians who say it does are overreaching. The same goes for Elohim: the plural form is used with singular verbs and is best read as a plural of majesty, not as a hint of the Trinity.

The point that holds is smaller. The Torah’s word for God’s oneness does not rule out distinction within the one God, and it does not require it. The strict definition of God’s unity that many Jews hold today owes much to Maimonides, who in the twelfth century defined it in the philosophical terms of his day: no body, no parts, no division of any kind. That is a serious and influential reading. It is a reading of the text, and the text itself has more to say about how God makes himself present.

Long before the New Testament, the Tanakh describes the one God acting and appearing in ways that distinguish without dividing:

• The angel of the LORD speaks to Hagar and promises, in the first person, to multiply her offspring, and she names “the LORD who spoke to her” as the God who sees (Genesis 16:7-13).
• At the burning bush, the angel of the LORD appears in the flame, and then God calls from the bush, “I am the God of your father” (Exodus 3:2-6).
• God sends an angel before Israel and warns them to obey him, “since My Name is in him” (Exodus 23:20-21).
• The LORD appears to Abraham at Mamre, and Abraham sees three men (Genesis 18:1-2).

In the centuries before Jesus, Jewish writers spoke of God’s Word, his Wisdom, his Spirit, and his Glory as God’s own presence at work. The Aramaic Targums speak of the Memra, the Word of the LORD, acting in the world, and the rabbis speak of the Shekhinah, God’s indwelling presence.

Jewish interpreters have read these as ways of speaking about the one God, not as distinct persons, and the text permits that reading. The Christian claim is that the New Testament draws on these same categories. When John calls Jesus “the Word” who was with God and was God (John 1:1), he uses language Jews already had for God’s own presence.

In Daniel 7, thrones are set in place and the Ancient of Days takes his seat. Then, in the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, “there came with the clouds of heaven One like unto a son of man, And he came even to the Ancient of days,” and he receives an everlasting dominion that all peoples serve (7:13-14). Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, riding on the clouds is something God does (Psalm 104:3; Isaiah 19:1).

The sages saw the difficulty. The Talmud records Rabbi Akiva reading the plural “thrones” of Daniel 7:9 as one for God and one for David, the Messiah, and Rabbi Yose rebuking him for profaning the divine presence (Sanhedrin 38b). Later rabbinic texts warn against those who say there are “two powers in heaven.” The warning was needed because the texts raised the question.

You can answer that Daniel’s interpretation gives the kingdom to “the holy ones of the Most High” (7:18, 27), and that many Jewish readers take the figure as a symbol of Israel. Even on that reading, the figure comes on the clouds and is brought before God to receive an everlasting dominion, a scene that troubled the rabbis. Jesus’ first followers claimed that Jesus is the one Daniel saw.

“God is not a man, that He should lie” (Numbers 23:19) comes from Balaam’s oracle, and its point is that God does not lie or change his mind as people do. In Hosea 11:9, God says he is God and not man, to explain why he will not destroy Ephraim in anger. Both verses contrast God’s faithfulness with human fickleness. They are not about whether God could ever be present in a human life.

The incarnation claims that the one God, without ceasing to be God, took on a human life. The Hebrew Bible does not shy from God drawing near in human form. The LORD appears to Abraham at Mamre and accepts his hospitality (Genesis 18). Jacob wrestles through the night with a man and names the place Peniel, because he has seen God face to face (Genesis 32:31 in Jewish Bibles, 32:30 in Christian ones; the Jewish Publication Society translation reads “a divine being”). Maimonides read such passages as prophetic visions or figures of speech. Christians read them differently, as early signs of the God who would later come near in Jesus.

So the claim concerns the God of Israel and is argued from Israel’s Scriptures; it is not the worship of another god. Whether it is true, which none of this shows, depends on who Jesus was, what he claimed, and whether God raised him. The case is set out in Jesus is God.