Oneness Pentecostalism
This is the last of the series on the Trinity, Part 3 of 3. It follows Trinity Part 1, "The Word That Isn't There" and Trinity Part 2, "The Word Made Mandatory"
Here’s something worth knowing before we start: the error this episode traces isn’t new. Collapsing Father, Son, and Spirit into one Person wearing three masks was tried once already, in the early church, and formally rejected around 230 AD — the position of Noetus, and later Sabellius. That fire caught again, in a tent in California, in April of 1913 — sixteen centuries later, in a movement that had no idea it was relighting something ancient. This is the story of how it happened, in the words of the men who lit it.
The Spark: One Offhand Remark in a Tent
The place was Arroyo Seco, California. The event was the World-Wide Apostolic Faith Camp Meeting, a major early Pentecostal gathering that drew preachers from across North America in April 1913. During one sermon, an evangelist named R.E. McAlister made an observation almost in passing — that in the book of Acts, the apostles never baptized anyone with the words “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Instead, every baptism recorded in Acts uses a different formula. McAlister’s own remark, as later Oneness historians record it, was that “the apostles invariably baptized their converts once in the name of Jesus” — pointing to Acts 2:38, 8:16, 10:48, and 19:5, where the baptismal formula recorded is some version of “in the name of Jesus.”
That single sentence did something nobody in the tent expected. That same night, another preacher present, John G. Scheppe, later described experiencing what he called a personal revelation about “the power of the name of Jesus.” By morning he was telling others. Within days, believers who had already been baptized “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” were being re-baptized “in Jesus’ name” — the beginning of what the movement itself would soon call “the New Issue.”
The Fire Catches: Frank Ewart Builds a Theology
A baptismal formula question could have stayed a minor liturgical dispute. It didn’t, because within about a year, a Los Angeles pastor named Frank Ewart took McAlister’s observation and built a complete theology on top of it — not just how to baptize, but who God actually is. Ewart’s own later history of the movement, The Phenomenon of Pentecost, describes the moment with a line that reads almost like he knew exactly what he’d started:
“The shot has been fired, and its sound was destined to be heard around the world, as Christendom would soon be shaken by this new doctrine.” — Frank Ewart, The Phenomenon of Pentecost (1947)
Ewart’s actual theological claim went well beyond the baptismal formula. His own summary of it: “The unity of God is sustained by the absolute unity or oneness of His name.” From that premise, Ewart concluded that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three distinct, eternally co-existing Persons, but three titles or modes of one single Person — the same Person, appearing as Father in creation, as Son in redemption, as Spirit in the church age. That is modalism, restated in early-twentieth-century American Pentecostal language, though nothing in the record suggests Ewart had studied Sabellius or knew he was rebuilding a position the church had already examined and rejected sixteen hundred years earlier.
The Split: A Denomination Answers
The new teaching spread fast inside the young Assemblies of God, fast enough that by their fourth General Council, meeting in St. Louis in October 1916, the denomination felt it had to settle the question formally. The result was a new “Statement of Fundamental Truths,” and its thirteenth article, “The Essentials As To the Godhead,” answers the Oneness claim directly:
“The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are never identical as to Person; nor confused as to relation; nor divided in respect to the Godhead; nor opposed as to cooperation. The Son is in the Father and the Father is in the Son as to relationship.” — Assemblies of God, Statement of Fundamental Truths, Article 13 (1916)
The vote had a real cost, on both sides, the same way Part 2 showed Nicaea’s enforcement did. The 1916 council’s new statement dropped the Assemblies of God’s ordained ministers roll from 585 to 429 — 156 ministers, roughly one in four, left or were removed over this single article. Many of them went on to found what eventually became the United Pentecostal Church International, still the largest Oneness Pentecostal denomination today.
What Oneness Actually Teaches, in Its Own Words
Fairness matters here, the same as it did with Arius and the five dissenting bishops in Part 2 — state the position accurately, not as a caricature. Here is the United Pentecostal Church International’s own current statement of what it believes, from its own published Articles of Faith:
“There is one God, who has revealed Himself as Father; through His Son, in redemption; and as the Holy Spirit, by emanation. Jesus Christ is God manifested in flesh... We believe in the one ever-living, eternal God: infinite in power, Holy in nature, attributes and purpose; and possessing absolute, indivisible deity.” — United Pentecostal Church International, Articles of Faith (current)
That is a real, serious, monotheism-guarding position, not an invented strawman — and it shares real common ground with what this series has already established: one God, not three separate gods, and the full deity of Christ (Colossians 2:9 — “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”). The actual disagreement is narrower and sharper than it might first appear: not whether God is one, and not whether Jesus is fully God — both sides affirm both — but whether Father, Son, and Spirit are the same single Person under three names and roles (”by emanation”), or three really distinct Persons who are one God relationally, the position Part 1 already built directly from the biblical text.
Running the Text Itself
Scripture settles this the same way it settled the questions in Parts 1 and 2 — not primarily by citing councils on either side, but by reading what the text actually records happening. One scene does more work than any other: the baptism of Jesus.
“And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” — Matthew 3:16–17
Read that as a single, real-time scene, not a metaphor. The Son stands in the water, being baptized. The Spirit visibly descends from above, as a dove. The Father’s voice speaks from heaven, addressing the Son in the third person — “This is my beloved Son.” If Father, Son, and Spirit are the same single Person appearing sequentially in different modes, this moment is impossible to narrate honestly: it requires three simultaneous, distinct, mutually-addressing actors in one scene, not one Person changing costume between acts. This is the single hardest verse in the whole Bible for modalism — ancient or modern — to account for on its own terms.
The rest of the Gospels confirm the same pattern from a different angle. Jesus prays to the Father — “O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (John 17:5) — a real address from one Person to a distinct other, not a soliloquy. On the cross, He cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) — real distinct address again, at the moment of deepest anguish, not performance. None of this denies Christ’s full deity — Colossians 2:9 settles that question in the other direction. And none of it requires the Nicene homoousios language that Part 2 already showed us goes beyond what Scripture itself states. It simply requires taking the text’s own plain narration seriously. In the text we see the Father and the Son address each other as two, throughout the Gospels, including at the two moments — baptism and crucifixion — where the stakes could not be higher.
The Point
Line this up against the whole series and the pattern becomes unmistakable. The ancient church correctly rejected modalism around 230 AD, for exactly the reason Matthew 3:16-17 gives: the text itself won’t allow one Person to occupy three simultaneous, mutually-addressing roles in a single real scene. Part 2 showed the opposite overcorrection — making a non-biblical Greek philosophical term mandatory. Doing so went beyond what Scripture requires. Oneness Pentecostalism, born in a tent in 1913 with no knowledge of the fourth century it was echoing, walked directly back into the first error, using twentieth-century American Pentecostal language instead of third-century Greek philosophical language, but making the identical underlying claim Noetus and Sabellius made and the church already tested against the text.
The correction isn’t a council in either direction. It’s the same discipline this whole series has followed from Part 1 onward: read what the text says the Father and the Son actually do, together, in the same scene, addressing each other as two — and don’t let either a mandatory philosophical formula or a mandatory denial of real distinction replace what’s actually written.
Closing
Three episodes, one throughline. Part 1 built the biblical case for what Scripture itself shows: real distinction between Father and Son, real oneness between them — relational, not a shared philosophical substance. Part 2 showed a council that answered a real question rightly but reached for a word Scripture never used, and enforced it with the sword. And this episode has shown a twentieth-century American revival that, without knowing it, walked back into that same ancient error — using new language for an old claim. Through all three, one thing hasn’t moved: Jesus is the Son of God, fully God, really distinct from the Father, and really one with Him — not by philosophical substance, and not by collapsing Persons into modes, but the way the text itself shows it, at the Jordan River, in Gethsemane, and on the cross.
Prove these things for yourself in the Bible. Then, believe the Bible, trust Jesus, and follow Him. God bless.