Deliberations with a JW

Wow, I just finished a four day on-line discussion of the Trinity with a person who will not admit that he is Jehovah's Witness, but wants to accuse me of dodging the issue when I tried to be friendly. He was not friendly, but tried to egg me into personal attacks. When I tried to engage in normal conversation with him, he wanted to bait me about "still dodging the question, are we?"

The 1,500 character limit, including spaces and paragraph returns, in yahoo's answers' email program was a major limitation to both of us, as it was hard to make a complete case with that severe of a space limit.

No amount of biblical reasoning, however, could change his ideas that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are not God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. He would not even capitalize the name of the Holy Spirit; instead calling the Spirit "it." He wanted to know "If Jesus was seated at the right hand of the Father, then where was the Holy Spirit?" He wanted the Holy Spirit to be a "force" of God in the world. I refused the idea of the Holy Spirit being merely a force, like something used in a Star Wars movie.

He would not answer the Bible facts I presented. E.g., that the Holy Spirit could be grieved (Eph 4:30) and lied to (Acts 5:3-4, where God and Holy Spirit are synonyms), is an attribute of a person; but that an impersonal force could neither be lied to nor offended. Or that only God can forgive sin, Mark 2:7 "Why does this man speak that way? He is blaspheming; who can forgive sins but God alone?" Jesus accepted their theology, but not their conclusion.

The Trinity being seen at Jesus' baptism (Matt 3:15-17) was meaningless to him, as was the Trinitarian formula in the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20). He accused me of tri-theism and polytheism, because in Gen 1:1 God is "Elohim," a plural Hebrew pronoun, so I believe in plural Gods.

My affirmation of Deuteronomy 6:4 "Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!" was useless to him. The English all caps "LORD" in the Hebrew is the tetragrammaton, the Holy Name of God, where the Hebrew YHWH is mixed with the vowels from Adonai "lord" to make it pronounceable; and, the "God" there is Elohim. This identifies the two words as synonyms for the same person, God; which he also refused.

My debater wanted to use the words of Matthew 28:18 "And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth," as meaning that Jesus is NOT God because He was "given the authority He had, and did not have it intrinsically."

I guess I did fail to bring in that the Septuagint (LXX) reading of Lord is the same as the Greek NT: Kurios, LORD. When Paul says Jesus is "Lord" throughout his Epistles, it is the same word the LXX used throughout the OT for God's personal name.

(Sigh)

Ah, well. I tried to end it on a friendly note, "Resistance is futile." LOL