Wohlberg, Steve. Satan’s War Against the Godhead. Priest River, ID: Present Truth, 2023.
Recently, I read Steve Wohlberg’s new book about the doctrine of the Trinity, Satan’s War Against the Godhead (Priest River, ID: Present Truth, 2023). I thought I'd share some brief thoughts with you about it through an informal book review since many have asked for my opinion of it.
Overall, the book is a very simple and straightforward look at the doctrine of the Trinity from the Bible and the writings of Ellen G. White. While Wohlberg avoids the term “Trinity” in the book—using “Godhead” and “Heavenly Trio” instead—what he affirms therein is essentially a minimal biblical teaching of the Trinity that there is one God in three persons. There were many things that I appreciated about the book, of which I will list three.
(1) First, I deeply appreciated his framing of the non-Trinitarian controversy within the overall theme of the cosmic conflict between good and evil (i.e., the great controversy between Christ and Satan). He sees the rise and growth of non-Trinitarianism in evangelicalism, and particularly Seventh-day Adventism, as a deceptive satanic attack on the Godhead. I couldn't agree more!
(2) Second, I thoroughly concur with Wohlberg's assessment that Ellen G. White understood as the “alpha” of apostasy John Harvey Kellogg’s turn to pantheism (or, probably more accurately, panentheism), which included a misconstruing of the biblical teaching about the Trinity, particularly a distortion of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit (conceiving of the Holy Spirit as the divine being pervading the essence of all living things). She wrote, "I was instructed that certain sentiments in Living Temple [sic] were the Alpha of a long list of deceptive theories."1 Herein, White employed a metaphor built on the Greek alphabet in which the first letter thereof is the letter alpha (α), indicating Kellogg's apostasy would be the first major deception among Seventh-Adventist people. Utilizing the same metaphor, White wrote that The Living Temple "contains the Alpha of these theories. The Omega would follow in a little while. I tremble for our people."2 Omega (ω) is the last letter of the Greek alphabet and thus indicative of the last major deception that Seventh-day Adventists would face in the time of the end, which would have a similar nature to that of Kellogg's apostasy. While we cannot define with great specificity the exact nature of the ultimate apostasy, White's comparison of it with Kellogg's false teachings in The Living Temple, suggests that the coming “omega” apostasy that White foresaw at the end will at least involve some distortions of the biblical doctrine of the Trinity and, especially, the Holy Spirit. While Wohlberg did not express it explicitly, he seemed to imply in his book that the non-Trinitarian movement is a manifestation of that “omega” apostasy. I wholeheartedly agree that this is at least an aspect of the "omega" apostasy and have been explicitly arguing the same.
(3) Third, I deeply appreciated Wohlberg's exposition of Rev 14:12–13, showing that this is a triadic passage (“God,” “Jesus,” and “the Spirit” are mentioned in close literary proximity). This indicates that the biblical doctrine of the Trinity is assumed by the apostle John, who embedded it in his inspired written record of the three angels’ messages. White stated that Seventh-day Adventists "have been given a work of the most solemn import—the proclamation of the first, second, and third angels’ messages. There is no other work of so great importance. They are to allow nothing else to absorb their attention."3 Since the doctrine of the Trinity is a part of the three angels' messages, it should be a part of the proclamation that Seventh-day Adventists are to give to the world. I love this assertion! In application of this, it seems to me that it is high time for pastors and evangelists to start including a sermon on the biblical doctrine of the Trinity in our public prophecy meetings as a part of our regular evangelistic cycle in church ministry.
While there is much to commend therein, there is at least one major problem with Wohlberg's book that makes me unwilling to recommend it to others. The author seems to trust implicitly that the KJV and NKJV translations are the best translations of the Bible because they are based upon the Textus Receptus—in contrast to the “Majority Text” and the “Critical Text.” This puts him in the impossible position of trying to prove the reliability of some obviously inauthentic interpolations of the text, such as the Comma Johanneum of 1 John 5:7–8. For this reason, he felt compelled to dedicate a whole chapter of the book to defending the originality and inspiration of the Comma instead of taking seriously the work of manuscript analysis of several specialized text-critical scholars (many of whom are serious, conservative believers with a high view of Scripture) over the last few hundred years. His defense of the Comma is not convincing, not even in the least bit, demonstrating that Wohlberg, as a media evangelist without rigorous formal education in textual criticism, is in no position to make such an evaluation. A cursory review of the history of the religious politics behind the Textus Receptus, in general, and the Comma, in particular, is enough to question the reliability of both. Furthermore, the text-critical process in reviewing the plethora of manuscripts available to us today has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the Comma was not written by the apostle John in his original Greek autograph of 1 John 5:7–8. While the arguably Trinitarian teaching asserted in the Comma is no doubt biblical, the text itself simply is not authentic. Since we can demonstrate the doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible sufficiently without the Comma, why go through all the trouble of trying to prove its validity? One can still uphold God's providential preservation of his word in history without rejecting the science of textual criticism. Wohlberg’s chapter 7 could have been utilized to provide more valid biblical data that affirms the biblical teaching of the Trinity. Instead, he wastes ten pages of his concise book on the foolhardy task of defending the Comma.4
In conclusion, if one can read Wohlberg's book and ignore the contents of chapter 7, then yes, it is a worthwhile undertaking. But I fear that some will read this book and accept “wholesale” what the author writes in chapter 7 merely because of his position in the church as a well-known media evangelist. To such persons, I suggest reading other books on the biblical doctrine of the Trinity that don’t defend blatantly false information and give a more thorough biblical defense of this crucial teaching in Scripture.
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Footnotes
1 Ellen G. White, "The Foundation of Our Faith," Manuscript 46, 1904 (May 18, 1904), Berrien Springs, MI (Silver Spring, MD: Ellen G. White Estate), n.p. The Living Temple was the title of Kellogg's controversial book that contained his panentheistic teachings.
2 Ibid.
3 Idem, Testimonies for the Church, 9 vols. (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press, 1885–1909), 9:19.
4 It is beyond the scope of this book review to give a thorough text-critical demonstration of the inauthenticity of the Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5:7–8. For this, see Rodrigo Barbosa Galiza and John W. Reeve, "The Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7–8): The Status of Its Textual History and Theological Usage in English, Greek, and Latin," AUSS 56.1 (2018): 63-89, https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/auss/vol56/iss1/6; Daniel B. Wallace, "The Textual Problem of 1 John 5:7–8," Bible.org (1998): n.p., https://bible.org/article/textual-problem-1-john-57-8; and idem, "The Comma Johanneum and Cyprian," Bible.org (n.d.): n.p., https://bible.org/article/comma-johanneum-and-cyprian.
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