The answer
It is true that such verses exist. For example:
“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this…” (Jas. 1:27);
“And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh” (1 Tim. 3:16);
“But Peter said, Ananias why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” (Acts 5:3).
It is evident that these verses do not refer to three separated gods, for the Master Christ said, “…the honour that [cometh] from the one God”11 (John 5:44).
The saying refers to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, Who are one Divine Being. One divinity with equal glory and eternal honour, according to Athanasius the Apostolic.12
It is like a person seeing the disk of the sun in the very early morning, at dawn, before the rays and the heat appear. He says of the disk alone, “the sun is out.”
When he sees the rays coming through a room in his house, he says that the sun is in the house. When he sits for a while in the heat of the sun and feels its effects, he says that he has a sunstroke.
When he says that the disk, or the rays, or the heat, is the sun, he does not mean that it is three suns. Rather, it is one sun, and the disk, rays, and heat are of the same one essence of the sun.
This is why St. Augustine says, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one essence, but not every Person is Himself the other.”13
His Holiness Pope Tawadros II
Notes
11 Translator’s note: This is the translation of the verse’s Arabic rendition. The KJV reading of the verse is, “…the honour that [cometh] from God only.”
12 Translator’s note: Cf. The Athanasian Creed, “But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, is all one: the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.” The authorship has falsely been attributed to St. Athanasius, and it is thought to have been written around the middle fifth/late sixth century (Philip Schaff. “The Athanasian Creed.” History of the Christian Church, Volume III: A.D. 311-600.).
13 Translator’s note: “And let him so say one essence, as not to think one to be either greater or better than, or in any respect differing from, another. Yet not that the Father Himself is both Son and Holy Spirit, or whatever else each is singly called in relation to either of the others” (cf. Augustine, On the Holy Trinity 7.6.12. Philip Schaff, ed. NPNF, Ser. 1, Vol. 3. Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers Inc., 1995.).
Pope Tawadros II, My Faith: A Series of Dialogues on the Creed (Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate, 2014), 36–38.
The pages in the book (36–38)
