Could God Be a Monad?

Can God the Father be God without Jesus or the Holy Spirit?

(From a question on Quora)

The question is asked in present tense, and it is a bit ambiguous. I take it to mean, Is God the Father able to remain God if God the Son and God the Holy Spirit were split off, eliminated, or retracted from the universe?

Your question could also be taken to mean, Could God the Father have chosen to be a unitary God without having also existed as Jesus or the Holy Spirit?

Based on the relationship between God and the universe, I would say yes with respect to His substance but no with respect to His character. The same answer applies to either interpretation of the question.

One of the arguments for the existence of God is known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument. It states:

• Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
  
• The universe began to exist (around 13.8 billion years ago)
  
• Therefore, the universe has a Cause. 

From the nature of the universe and related arguments, one can derive (without turning to revealed information such as the Bible) that the Cause is timeless, spaceless, non-contingent, unimaginably powerful, volitional, and unfathomably intelligent. In other words, God.

According to General Relativity, time, space, matter, and energy are so intertwined that if God created the universe, He created time and space, as well. Creative power over time and space allows their Creator to be omnipresent and omnitemporal — which explains omniscience with respect to both every location and every time.

Creative power over time and space also allows God to enter and experience time and space as one Person (or center of consciousness) or as a billion Persons, yet remain One God outside of the Universe. As it happens, He chose to exist in time and space as three Persons. Those three Persons, while remaining in every way equal, voluntarily took on different roles and titles: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Due to the feat of entering time and space, all three Persons have the same substance (spirit). If God were a creature of the universe, this would be counter intuitive. However, with God having His “home” or “natural” existence outside of time and space, all three Persons can consist of the same spiritual substance.

We would be bothered by the physical law that two things can simultaneously occupy the same space at the same time. However, God’s substance is Spirit, not physical; so He is not subject to the same limits as we are.

Since all three Persons consist of the same substance, eliminating one or two of the Persons would not affect the existence of the third Person. Neither would it affect the existence of God outside of time and space.

So, with respect to God’s substance, one Person of the Trinity could exist without the other two.
But is this consistent with God’s character? God is relational and loving, and He has no needs. To exist as a unitary Person (a “monad”) would leave a relational God without any source or object of love until He created intelligent life. If God has no needs, then this makes it probable that God existed as three Persons even “before” creation. As Genesis 1:1 says, In the beginning, Gods (Elohim, “gods”) created (singular) the heavens and the earth.….

If the Son and the Holy Spirit ceased to exist in the universe, God the Father would still be God. However, He would cease to be “the Father” because you can’t be a father without at least one person in the role of “the Child” (or “the Son”).

Also, the roles of the three Persons teach us about relationships and solve problems that I won’t go into now. (For example, how can God remain untouched by corruption and at the same time experience incarnation? Or how can God simultaneously express His wrath and be the subject of that wrath in our place?) God would have to either fulfill the functions of all three Persons or eliminate some of those functions.

If God is God, then He is maximally great. If God is maximally great, then any other form in which He existed in the universe would be less than maximally great. By definition, a less-than-maximally great god would not be God.

To Modalists such as Oneness Pentecostals and to sects such as the Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witnesses), Oneness is not a problem. Modalists believe God is a quick-change artist, switching between three hats in order to deceive people into thinking He is three Persons. But that makes God a deceiver. The Watchtower teaches that only the Father is God because the Son is just an exalted archangel and the Holy Spirit is just an impersonal force of God.

But we are approaching this from the view that all three Persons are God, so a lonely, God is an unsolvable problem for Modalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, and Muslims.

So my final answer is that, if two Persons ceased to be, the third Person could continue to be God. However, as a monad, God would have had or might still have unfulfilled needs and would be less than maximally great, so without the Son and the Holy Spirit, He would not be God.

Copyright 2020, Richard Wheeler. Since I originally posted this answer on Quora, I probably lost the right to claim copyright. However, I ask that if you use this material, please give credit where credit is due.