Gospel Guidebook: Getting and Keeping It Right 
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Review of Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves
by Robert P. TerryPublished October 3, 2025
For the first four centuries of Christianity, all the Christian creeds, including the Apostles' Creed and First Council of Constantinople in 381, professed the Biblical truth that there is one God the Father. However, starting most prominently with Augustine, this plain truth was changed. "One God the Father" was replaced with the "Triune God."
Michael Reeves is a promoter of this strange god known as the Triune God. Take, for example, his first use of the word "triune" on page 9. He says, "God’s triune being makes all his ways beautiful." Note how he refers to this triune being using the possessive personal pronoun "his." For Reeves, the Triune God is a person, and this person is not the "One God the Father" of the Bible. We can be certain of this because in his second usage of the word "triune" in the same paragraph he says, "For God is triune, and it is as triune that he is so good and desirable." Again, note how he refers to this triune god as "he."
On page 12, he demonstrates again that he views the Trinity as a person by saying, "To know the Trinity is to know God, an eternal and personal God of infinite beauty, interest and fascination. The Trinity is a God we can know, and forever grow to know better." For Reeves, the Trinity is a personal God who just so happens to be a compound unity of persons (more on this below). But wait, doesn't this give us a total of four persons: the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? On page 13, this is how he explains Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (quotation from the book provided below). He refers to the Lord (i.e., his supposed Trinity) as a "he," but then says that "he" consists of persons.
I'll now quote from page 13 and give my comments in the next paragraph. Reeves says, "'Then what about Deuteronomy 6:4?' I hear my many Muslim readers cry. 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.' One, not three. But the point of Deuteronomy 6:4 is not to teach that 'The Lord our God, the Lord is a mathematical singularity.' In the middle of Deuteronomy 6, that would be a bit out of the blue to say the least. Instead, Deuteronomy 6 is about God’s people having the Lord as the one object of their affections: he is the only one worthy of them, and they are to love him alone with all their heart, soul and strength (Deut 6:5). In fact, the word for 'one' in Deuteronomy 6:4 really doesn’t convey 'mathematical singularity' at all well. The word is also used, for example, in Genesis 2:24, where Adam and Eve—two persons—are said to be one."
Reeves says that viewing the word "one" (Hebrew "echad," the ordinary cardinal number for one) as a mathematical singularity (its usual usage, overwhelmingly) is "a bit out of the blue to say the least." Despite his confidence, it is not out of the blue at all. Moses is basically restating the first two commandments of Deut. 5:6-10 (which he also alludes to in the immediate context of Deut. 6:12-15). For Reeves' interpretation to be viable, the word "one" in Deut. 6:4-5 would need to refer to "what" the Lord is (i.e., a compound unity of persons as signified by his reference to Adam and Eve), but it is clear from the context of Deut. 5:6-10 and 6:12-15 that it refers to "who" the Lord is (i.e., the Lord "who" brought them out of Egypt). Because the Lord is one, as a singular "who," He can demand whole-hearted worship, being the jealous God who refuses to share His glory with others. However, Reeves suggests the Lord is a compound personal object who consists of persons, something that would inevitably divide the worshiper's heart among the different persons. This is a conundrum that most Trinitarians would prefer not to talk about. (Of course, they'll appeal to "perichoresis" to try to wiggle out of this predicament, but a consistent view of perichoresis collapses into modalism, as was basically noted by Oliver Crisp on page 30 of his book Divinity and Humanity. As a countermeasure, Crisp suggested a "weak perichoresis," which if taken to its logical end, destroys the whole point of appealing to perichoresis in the first place. Crisp didn't seem to realize this.)
It is definitely time for people to ditch the "Triune God" and return to the God of the Bible. See page 40 of Philip Schaff's Creeds of Christendom Vol. II where he shows that the unanimous rule of faith in the first four centuries of the church was "We believe in one God the Father." He cites the Apostles' Creed, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Novatian, Origen, Gregory, Lucian, Eusebius, Cyril, Niceae 325, and Constantinople 381. It wasn't until later that this strange god, this triune god usurped the throne as the abomination of desolation. Trinitarians would do well to take their perichoresis to its logical end and start considering theories of modalism (other than the caricature of it presented by the enemies of Sabellius). A good place to start would be realizing that the distinctions between the Father and Son are incarnational, not eternal, due to divine nature (God as God, i.e., the Father) and the human nature (God as man, i.e., the Son of God), and that the only trinity you'll find in the Bible is economic and not immanent.