“Why Don’t you be a Jew or Muslim Instead?”

After a somewhat rough night of sleep, I had yet again awoken to an email alert of another Trinitarian critic online.

This one approached me, saying:

“Why would you want to be an Arian, I don’t understand Arian Christianity at all, if you don’t believe Jesus is God, then you should be a Jew or Muslim instead”.

This isn’t the first time I’ve ever received this very argument, or attempt at an insult verbatim. So perhaps by now you’d think it shouldn’t surprise me, or take me aback every time I see it. But the fact of the matter is, it does every time.

My simple answer to the man, as it is to anyone who approaches me with such a rebuttal to what form my faith takes, is simply that:

1. Judaism (with exception to Messianics) rejects the notion that Yeshua is the Messiah who is the saviour of the world who died for our sins. And because I believe in the writings of the New Testament, and that Yeshua is the Saviour and Messiah, then, ‘common sense’ should inform you, of why I don’t subscribe to Judaism. Furthermore, if I didn’t believe in Yeshua as the saviour, then I, as a Gentile, as opposed to a Jew, would be a Noahide! (If you don’t know what that is, look it up, and pay attention to the Covenant of Noah in the Bible).
2. For like reason, I’m not a Muslim, because Muslims, whilst calling Yeshua “Messiah” in their religious texts, don’t have an understanding of what that actually means, which is defined by the background of Judaism and Christianity that came out of it. And they also do not believe Yeshua even died for our sins. That and I find Muhammed in general in my own opinion, to be a false prophet and an antichrist.

So the reasons should be quite blatant enough, I am Christian because I believe the New Testament. But I am not Trinitarian because I do not believe that’s what the New Testament ‘teaches’ and nor was it the belief of the great majority of early Christians.

When I think upon and examine the reasoning, however, that these Trinitarians devise when questioning me in such a way, I find that it’s quite incredible how they don’t seem to see what they are actually saying…

Trinitarians who tell me to become Jewish or Muslim, are asserting that I’d be better straying ‘further away’ from the Lord and Saviour, than to remain as close as I can to him. They’d prefer for me to ‘reject’ the Lord Yeshua completely, and to reject all his of work, commands, and ultimately his sacrifice for our sins, even to follow an alternative antichrist religion which even ‘further’ attacks Yeshua’s identity, role, and purpose, merely over a “Christological” difference concerning the understanding of his identity and scriptural hermeneutics.

It goes to show you how some of these people don’t have their priorities straight. They believe it’s better, more preferable, to ‘reject’ altogether the saviour, his sacrifice, his hope, his commands, and his messiahship, than to merely have a different view of his identity or nature.

To these people, salvation doesn’t come from him dying for our sins, or accepting him as being appointed as king over all (which yes, we non-trinitarians believe), or obeying his decrees of living in love and righteousness, but in ‘solely’ holding some philosophical belief system or very ‘specific’ interpretation of extremely ambiguous verses of scripture, of what Yeshua’s “origin”, “substance” or “essence” is, and everything else be damned. Even atheism and living in absolute immoral wickedness is a preferable option than to being a non-Trinitarian Christian to Trinitarians who think this way.

How back to front can you get?

Is it not better to believe he is the Anointed One? That he is made the King of the universe at God the Father’s side? That his death purged our sins? To obey his commands on how we should conduct our way of life, in which we will be judged? To support his Kingdom? To believe salvation and eternal life is found in nobody else, but him?

I hold no hatred or judgement toward Trinitarian brothers, even though I might disagree with them, and if one believes the Bible ‘truly’ teaches Trinitarianism, then please my friends, in all your heart and strength, BE Trinitarian! But never ever, in my life would I tell you, to go and worship the three-headed Indian god Trimurti, or to become a Wiccan, or any other path in which one abandons the New Covenant.

This is because priority is in believing Yeshua is Lord and King, and has died for our sins! That his coming in the flesh, his death and resurrection, and his authority over us, not our understanding of Christology, is the ‘core’ of the Gospel.

As our Lord said, the blind do not commit sin, and those who do not know any better of what they should be doing or believing, will not receive as many strokes of punishment as those who do (John 9:41, Luke 12:48), why? Because they hold to the most important facets of all, desiring to obey the one Saviour and King of the world, because no matter what we understand of his identity, God had commanded us to put our faith in him. But to reject him altogether, one could not be in a worse position than that.

• “For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.” – 2 Peter 2:21

What utter evil and blasphemy then, to tell someone who you have one theological or Christological disagreement with, to abandon his faith in the Messiah and the body and blood of his death altogether! What kind of madness has overcome such a mind?!

• “…whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea!” – Matthew 18:6

See how, even some of the earliest, Christians, amongst their disagreements concerning the pre-human existence of Yeshua, lovingly treated one another:

“But since I have certainly proved that this man is the Christ of God, whoever he be, (even if I do not prove that he pre-existed), and submitted to be born a man of like passions with us, having a body, according to the Father’s will; in this last matter alone is it just to say that I have erred, and not to deny that He is the Christ, though [if] it should appear that he was born man of men, and [nothing more] is proved [than this], that he has become Christ by election?

For there are some, my friends, of our [Christian] race, who admit that he is Christ, while holding him to be man of men; with whom I do not agree, nor would I, even though most of those who have the same opinions as myself should say so; since we were enjoined by Christ Himself to put no faith in human doctrines, but in those proclaimed by the blessed prophets and taught by Himself”. – Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter 48

Justin here holds to the same point, that even though he disagrees with his Adoptionist brothers, he still views them as Christian and friends, and that if it cannot be proven that Yeshua existed before he was a man, it was at the very least acceptable for a Christian to understand him to be the Messiah elected by God to die for our sins.

And indeed, I am in agreement on this principle.

This is not to say I do not think truth is important, or understanding who the Son of God truly is, is nothing to be concerned about or pay attention to. If I did think such a thing, I’d just attend a Trinitarian church, and wouldn’t bother writing all these articles in the first place in discussing my views concerning Christology. The Apostles made it clear that we should beware of those preaching a “false Yeshua” (2 Corinthians 11:4). And just what that “false Yeshua is”, is where many of us will part ways.

But to tell people to abandon the faith altogether, for what they ‘know’ to be utterly false, and in rejection of the salvation of the crucifixion of our Lord, the Son of God, and from the path of seeking to follow and understand his teachings, I think such a person needs to re-evaluate themselves and their thought process of just what the Gospel really is, and what they are placing their hope in.