who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person…
—Hebrews 1:3

There is a false teaching that only Jesus is God, and that the Father and the Holy Spirit are manifestations of Jesus Christ. Those who teach this call themselves “Oneness” believers, and their main argument is that the word “Trinity” is not in the Bible, that the Trinity means many gods, and that the Bible clearly says God is one. First, the Bible says that God is “one” [Hebrew echad, united], not “a single one”, and second, the threefold nature of God means many gods only in the “Oneness” understanding.

We often hear the expression “persons” of the Godhead, implying that God is three persons — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This view is not according to Scripture. The thing is that in the New Testament, when it speaks of the nature of God, the Greek word hupostasis is used. When the Bible was translated into Latin, the Latin word substantia [Greek hupostasis] meant substance or matter and did not quite correctly reflect the nature of God, since He is Spirit, not matter. So they began to use the word person [Latin persona]. In our understanding the word person is always associated with a human being, so when we say that there are three persons in God, misunderstandings arise. In fact God manifests Himself through one person — Jesus Christ, for it was the Son of God who became flesh and appeared in human form, not the Father or the Holy Spirit.

The nature of God is based not on three persons but on hypostases. The Greek word hupostasis, or in Russian ipostas, means a foundation on which a building rests. Clearly, with our limited created minds we cannot understand the nature of the infinite God, because when we try to explain His nature we operate with the concepts of creation, while He is the Creator and is above all creation. His nature has to be accepted by faith, not understood with our brains.

John 1:1 destroys two errors at once. The first is that only Jesus is God, and the Father and the Holy Spirit are just manifestations of Christ; the second is that Jesus is not God. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” If the Son of God were at the same time the Father, John would simply have written: “In the beginning was God, and God became flesh.” The phrase “the Word was with God” refutes the errors of the “Oneness” believers. The next phrase, “the Word was God”, refutes the errors of those who call themselves “Jehovah’s Witnesses” and deny that the Son of God is God. And from John 1:14 it is clear that this Word is our Lord Jesus Christ. God in this case is the Father, for Paul writes: “yet for us there is one God, the Father…” [1 Cor.8:6]. It was not the Father who appeared in the flesh, but the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom [heart] of the Father, who has declared to us the nature, or hypostasis, of God the Father. [Jhn.1:18]