Unitarian apostates

Sam, you should be embarrassed to slander a Christian like this. I worship the one true God, and have since I was born again in 1978.

I wasn’t planning to comment on Tuggy’s Christian status. Since, however, he’s thrown down the gauntlet, I’ll take it up.

i) Tuggy is a paradigm apostate. What is more, like many apostates, he’s also a recruiter. A self-deceived deceiver.

From a Reformed standpoint, if he dies in his current condition, he was never regenerate. “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us” (1 Jn 2:19).

ii) Tuggy ceased to be a Christian the moment he became a unitarian. “No one who denies the Son has the Father” (1 Jn 2:23).

Keep in mind that John’s antithetical statement is contextualized by John’s high Christology. John repeatedly teaches the deity of Christ.

For a useful summary of the evidence, cf. Andreas Köstenberger, “The Deity of Christ in John’s Gospel,” “The Deity of Christ in John’s Letters and the Book of Revelation,” C. Morgan & R. Peterson, eds. The Deity of Christ (Crossway 2011), chaps 4,6.

Of course, unitarians like Tuggy deny that John teaches the deity of Christ, but that’s irrelevant. Unitarian Christology is on a par with Ufological Christology. You have professing Christians who think Jesus was really an alien from outer space. They, too, deny the deity of Christ. The fact that both groups present alternative Christologies doesn’t make them Christian. Just deluded.

Tuggy has allied himself with John’s Christ-denying opponents in 1 John. Sam didn't slander Tuggy. Rather, Tuggy slanders the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. 

I can't fathom where you get the idea that I'm uninterested in exegesis (prejudice based on my being a philosopher?); in point of fact, I've spent many years sweating through the texts, reading trinitarian and unitarian arguments with constant recourse to them.

In my exchanges with Tuggy, he ducks exegesis. And for someone like Tuggy, exegesis is a waste of time. Regardless of what the exegesis yields, Tuggy can always resort to his philosophical escape-cause to evade any unwelcome exegetical results.

The very point of the logic is to find some fixed points to reason about what the authors are and are not saying, on the assumption that they are self-consistent.

But Tuggy doesn’t assume the viewpoint of the Bible writers to understand how they understood consistency. Rather, he swaps out their understanding, then swamps in his understanding.