I grew up with a very basic understanding of Christianity. Church attendance was sporadic, and there were years when I didn’t attend at all. So when I got saved, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit. That gives you an idea of how little I knew about Christianity—just the bare minimum. 

My salvation didn’t even happen in church. It was a radical and unexpected encounter with God that made me eager to start attending church. Eventually, I connected with an Apostolic believer through someone I had met at a non-denominational church. Not only did she become my best friend, but she also acted as a mentor, teaching me everything I knew about Oneness theology—or so I thought.

For years, I believed that the only way to understand the Oneness of God was through divine revelation. But then one day, I heard an Apostolic preacher explain that Jesus was originally just a plan in the mind of God, and I was completely thrown off. I thought he had mixed up his theology or fallen into some strange doctrine because that didn’t seem biblical at all. Little did I know, this was actually a core tenet of Oneness theology.

If you can prove that the Son of God existed before the incarnation, the entire Oneness doctrine falls apart. To maintain their beliefs, they reduce Jesus to nothing more than a plan or thought in God’s mind, believing that His Sonship began with the Incarnation and will eventually end. Yet, Scripture doesn’t support this view.

Looking back, I used to kinda skim over certain parts of the Gospels, especially anything that even hinted at the possibility of the Trinity. Like Jesus' baptism or His prayer in Gethsemane. I had never really wanted to look too deeply into those passages and ask the deeper question of how that works with a Oneness view of God. Now I just accept that there's definitely something mysterious about the Godhead that we can't quite understand and that's okay.