My ISA Comment

Recently I made a comment on AggieAtheist's I Survived Armstrongism concerning the doctrine of the Trinity and the spurious Johannine Comma. She decided not to publish it and she has every right to do so. So I decided to publish my comments, with some adaptation, as a blog here but I deliberately decided not to mention this earlier controversy in order to keep the focus on HWA and his deceptive polemics.

Then she came back with this: "Redfox712, when you posted the comment I redacted here, to your own blog, I notice you left out the bit about how I’M “deceived by Satan”, just because I don’t believe in YOUR version of the trinity.

"Nice."

I'm not sure what to make of this assertion. I confess as being somewhat surprised at this response. Maybe some readers will better understand.

My comment was to say how HWA used the Johannine Comma in a deceptive way. In Mystery of the Ages he made it appear as though the Johannine Comma was the only proof text in the Bible Trinitarians used to prove the Trinity. Such is not the case as I tried to show. Although I myself believe in the Trinity now, partly because the Armstrongites never bothered to explain away Matthew 28: 19-20 to me, my focus in the comment was to expose the deceptive methods used by HWA using the Johannine Comma to discredit the Trinity in a deceptive way.

This is the comment I made that has caused this controversy. Let the reader judge what I said for better or worse.

It is a well known fact that the Johannine Comma does not belong in the Bible, hence most modern translations now omit it.

From Wikipedia: "The words "apparently crept into the Latin text of the New Testament during the Middle Ages... [possibly] as one of those medieval glosses but were then written into the text itself by a careless copyist. Erasmus omitted them from his first edition; but when a storm of protest arose because the omission seemed to threaten the doctrine of the Trinity (although that doctrine had in fact been formulated long before the textual variant), he put them back in the third and later editions, whence they also came into the textus receptus, “the received text.”[(Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? A Short History of the Scriptures, Penguin Books Ltd, 2005, p. 156)] Modern Bible translations such as the NIV, NASB, ESV, NRSV and others tend to either omit the Comma entirely, or relegate it to the footnotes." This in and of itself does not destroy the doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy because this error was introduced in a Latin translation.

Personally I learned of this from HWA, the lying false prophet himself. He used this very account of the Johannine Comma to discredit the Trinity in Mystery of the Ages, near the end of Chapter 1. There HWA falsely states that "There is only 1 small passage in the Authorized Version of the Bible that is generally used by Trinity adherents to support the Trinity doctrine." Referring to the spurious Johannine Comma. This assertion of his is not true at all. It is a lie. If one should read Walter Martin's Kingdom of the Cults you will see that that assertion is not true. Other scriptures can and have been used to support the Trinity. Here are just a few examples:

When I was a slave of Armstrongism they never really explained to me how is it that if the Holy Spirit really is just an impersonal force how is it that Jesus said, "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19, NKJV). How could He say this unless the Holy Spirit is equal to the Father and the Son. They used other scriptures to impose their own heretical understanding but they never explained to me this scripture based on their doctrine. The Armstrongites never explained this to me.

Also if the Holy Spirit really is just an impersonal force like the wind how can "it" speak? "As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, “Now separate to Me Barnabas and Saul" (Acts 13:2, NKJV). If the Armstrongite should say that this is the Father or the Son speaking through the Holy Spirit then such a one is saying the Bible is incorrect and is actually correcting the Bible rather than letting the Bible teach him or her. That assertion contradicts this scripture.

If the Holy Spirit is just an impersonal force how can someone lie to "it." "why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:3, NKJV)". Can one lie to the wind? Then how can one lie to the Holy Spirit unless the Holy Spirit is a personal being?

Whatever happens in this little dispute we must always remember that the really important issue here is was HWA a man of God? If he was why did he resort to such deceptive polemics?