GOD A PERSON

De: Guillermo Santamaria

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The book argues that calling God “a person” must be defined carefully: not “a human being,” but a living “who” who speaks, wills, loves, covenants, judges, and relates. It then applies that to Scripture’s presentation of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as personal agents—God is not an impersonal force, and the gospel itself assumes personal communion and reconciliation with God rather than alignment with an abstract principle.

From an Old School Baptist angle, it compares Trott and Beebe as sharing the same core confession—one God truly revealed as Father, Son, and Spirit—while differing in vocabulary instincts. Trott aggressively guards divine oneness and rejects loose “tri-personality” language because he thinks undefined “three persons” talk easily drifts toward imagining three Gods; he’s willing to speak of Father/Son/Spirit as “personal” insofar as Scripture shows real agency and relations (especially the Spirit’s “will” in 1 Cor. 12:11), but he refuses wording that implies three independent beings. Beebe, more pastoral than polemical, prefers apostolic phrasing (“God manifest in the flesh,” “fulness of the Godhead bodily”) and warns against turning mystery into speculative diagrams; he expresses triune reality most naturally in worship and prayer—prayer to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit—while maintaining that “these three are One.”

The paper also brings in Greek and Hebrew to reinforce both unity and distinction: the Shema’s “one” (אֶחָד, eḥād) anchors monotheism; creation language highlights Word and Spirit as divine agents; and New Testament patterns like “to the Father… through the Son… in one Spirit” (Eph. 2:18) frame how the one God is known. It explains Hebrews 1:3’s “person” as ὑπόστασις (hypostasis), stressing “substantial reality/being” more than modern “person” language, and it argues the Spirit’s personhood from personal actions and volition (“as he wills”), not from a single “magic” term. Finally, it answers the “every appearance of God is Jesus” claim by affirming Christ as God’s ultimate revealer while warning that Scripture itself doesn’t authorize the universalized version of that statement.