Q5. Are there more Gods than one?

A. There is but one only, the living and true God.

It is often debated whether the Shema in Hebrew is a confession of the unity and simplicity of God, or else the uniqueness or exclusiveness of God: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Duet. 6:4). Now the word “one” (’ehod) in Hebrew may also be rendered as the adjective “alone,” so a different kind of “one.” The Septuagint renders this, “The Lord our God is one Lord.” There are grammatical arguments in favor of this translation.1 But the most compelling argument is really contextual. Given that this is a confessional statement to Israel in the middle of prohibitions against idolatry, the idea that this is about monotheism makes more sense than that this is speaking about one attribute, such as the unity or simplicity of God. So the Westminster divines’ use of this verse as a proof text is solidified. 

The Necessity of Monotheism 

Some have been known to twist the Scriptures to suggest more than one God. For instance, where Paul says that, 

For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist (1 Cor. 8:5-6).

An honest reading of this text in its context shows that Paul is dealing with matters like meat sacrificed to pagan idols. He is dealing with the relations between stronger and weaker brothers; and one of the ways to call people to maturity about such things is to get over our surprise that people will have so many diverse religious ideas. In that context he says “many gods” and “many lords.” Beyond that, he had already qualified the point by the use of the words “so-called gods” (v. 5). And if that is not enough, we can back up yet another verse where he had also said: “we know that ‘an idol has no real existence,’ and that ‘there is no God but one’” (v. 4). So there is simply no excuse to tweezer this verse out of context to suggest that Paul is making room for many gods. 

Now can one also make an argument from logical necessity? In other words, is there a natural theology argument that there is only one God? One of the complaints against natural theology—or the traditional proofs for the existence of God—is that they do not show the “God of the Bible.” There are several problems with this complaint. Here we confine ourselves to only one; and that is that we can indeed exclude the possibility of other gods by reason. One of the ways that Aquinas demonstrated the unity of God is from the infinity of his perfection. The argument runs like this:

“that God comprehends in Himself the whole perfection of being. If then many gods existed, they would necessarily differ from each other. Something therefore would belong to one, which did not belong to another. And if this were a privation, one of them would not be absolutely perfect; but if a perfection, one of them would be without it. So it is impossible for many gods to exist.”2

Part of this argument is intuitive and another part not. The trouble with not understanding the more difficult philosophy behind it is that the intuitive part runs into some valid objections (considered in themselves). For instance, If infinity is not to be considered spatially or sequentially, then why may there not be multitudes of infinities? The answer is that there may—but such “infinities” are just one more sequential or spatial kind. Divine infinity is not a theoretical infinity, such as in mathematics or geometry, but rather limitless Being. What is really in view is that for a perfection of Being to be a perfection, it must be all that is in God (as follows from divine simplicity). There are several reasons for this. One is that composition implies organization of parts, from which it follows that each part was an effect and not the First Cause. But supposing it is replied: “Very well, then why can there not be multiple perfectly simple Beings?” Then we must appeal to the Platonic strand and point out that shared predication between any two or more particulars (two or more such beings) implies a universal that is greater than them both: e.g. the “goodness” of both beings would defer to some greater Form to which the lesser particulars were “good” about, or good with its Goodness. 

The Uniqueness of Monotheism 

Critical scholars in the nineteenth century began to argue that Jewish religion emerged in more primitive forms of worship that had to evolve to monotheism. In other words, they mean more than simply that Abraham was first a pagan and was called out of the worship of false gods, or that Israel was constantly being corrected as they defaulted back into the idolatry of their pagan neighbors. We would affirm all of that. What these critics were saying was that the people of the Hebrew Scriptures delivered to us a Scripture that itself evolved. This evolutionary worldview of the nineteenth century was what was behind the so-called Documentary Hypothesis, or JEPD Theory, of Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1883) that is still with us today, in spite of being discredited even among secular scholars.3 

The idea is this: 1. All things are evolving. 2. Religious things are things, and so they are evolving as well. 3. But Jewish religion is a religion, and so it too much have evolved. In such a narrative, mankind passes from the worship of natural objects and phenomena (animism), to the divinization of the largest forces among these (polytheism), to the localization and organization of those into hierarchies (henotheism), until finally, a religion reaches the more abstract and systematic stage where all is consolidated into a singular, unifying principle (monotheism).

What emerges from these philosophical presuppositions is a system of Higher Criticism. It comes not from the reading of the text as it is, but it imagines a pattern in the text impressed by the philosophical scheme. Now the Documentary Hypothesis is so named because it posits that the Hebrew canon is a patchwork composition of documents, such that all of the subsequent redactions explain what critics regard to be its “many contradictions.” Its other name, the “JEDP Theory,” is rooted in what its proponents regard to be the four basic sources of the Pentateuch especially. J is for Jahwist because it was the German for ‘Yahweh.’ E is for Elohist. D is for the Deuteroist. P is for the Priestly source. Without getting into all of the elements of this, one of the earliest features in the Scripture that these critics point to is the use of two different names for God in the first two chapters of Genesis. Never mind that several Ancient Near Eastern deities have long been known to have been called by multiple names, there is actually a perfectly good reason for these two names of God to show up as early as they do in the Bible. 

Elohim (אֱלהִים) is the general name for God in Hebrew. It is grammatically plural and can be used of gods in general.4 That is not surprising when we consider that Greek does the same with theos (θεός). If we are getting lost in the details, just remember that English does the same, and in fact that is the whole reason we are having this conversation! If the word “gods” could not “double” to refer to the true and the false, then how exactly does it do so in that very objection that either regards there to be more than one, or else no true one at all? The whole internal logic of the objection breaks down on a moment’s notice. The other name is the one behind the capitalized word LORD in our English Bibles. It is Adonai (יְהוָֹה) and is the unspeakable name of God, or Tetragrammaton. But it is also the covenant name of YHWH. The significance of that is that when Moses moves from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, he is moving from the cosmological account of creation (i.e. from the perspective of the whole universe) to the anthropological account (i.e. from the perspective of man’s vocation in that world). Since man is made in the image of God—and since God is reconstituting humanity in this new people called Israel—the book of Genesis is functioning as a kind of reintroduction to reality in the covenanting between God and a new people for a new world. The skeptic may not have interest in such things; but that is frankly his problem and not ours. He is not at liberty to call reason to witness against what is really something beyond his attention span.

There is a consistent testimony to the zeal that God has for his own Name and uniqueness among his people. To confine this to Deuteronomy and those chapters in Isaiah (40 through 48) is the same sort of reductionistic thinking as views New Testament texts on the deity of Christ only through the lens of explicit statements. Likewise, in the Old, the uniqueness of the one, true God is taught in a myriad of ways. First, there are those explicit statements: 

“I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god … Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any” (Is 44:6).

There are also implicit statements. For instance, any texts that speak of God not sharing his glory with beings lesser than himself (Isa. 42:8, 48:11). This would include all of the prohibitions and punishments for any form of syncretism. 

The Implications of Monotheism

The adjectives LIVING and TRUE are not to be glossed over lightly with respect to God. “But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God and the everlasting King” (Jer. 10:10). These two words condemn both doctrinal indifference and practical atheism that lives as though God is not ever-present. 

That God is the living God is once again the great hope of the righteous and the great terror of the wicked: “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand” (Deut. 32:39). But not only is God the only One that humanity has to ultimately fear, but for that same reason he is the only One whose promise of salvation is good: “besides me there is no savior” (Is 43:11).

This truth by itself eliminates Mormonism. That so called church of “Latter Day Saints” teaches that there are an infinite regress of gods, and that the one they call “elohim” is only the one of this local universe, with whom we deal. Furthermore, in their Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, it says,

“God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!!! . . . We have imagined that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea and take away the veil, so that you may see.”5

This is what they call eternal progression: that God was once as us and that we will become as him. If one does not live in Utah or Idaho, it can come as quite a shock the LDS Church actually teaches this, but in fact they have done so from early on. The distinction between the divine and non-divine, in their religion, is less a matter of being and more a matter of stage of development. While they are functionally polytheist (or, if one wants to be pedantic, “cosmically henotheist”), in terms of metaphysics they are really as much materialists as the ancient Greeks.

But this truth also needs to be remembered when it comes to time to think through the Son or the Holy Spirit being mentioned in the same breath as God, whether by divine titles, actions, prerogatives, or worship. If we begin with the premise of monotheism, any notions of tritheism must be thrown out as heresy; but also, any texts that would leave God sharing his glory with beings lesser than himself (cf. Isa. 42:8, 48:11), must also be judged to be faulty interpretations of those texts. Thus the Arians, the Socinians, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, all err in supposing that what is ascribed of Christ could be reduced to names shared with other mere mortals such as “Lord” (kurios), or that the titles “firstborn” (prototokos) or “only begotten” (monogenes) suggest any ontological inferiority or emergence in a sequence of time. Such commits the very mistake of blending the eternal being with the creaturely that these views launch out to avoid. 

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1. Edward J. Woods, Deuteronomy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 134-35.

2. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. I, Q.11, Art.3

3. One early refutation came from Princeton scholar Oswald T. Allis, The Five Books of Moses (1947) Another important contribution came from one who accepts evolutionary assumptions, rejects Mosaic authorship, yet thoroughly critiques the JEDP Theory, is R. N. Whybray’s The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological Study (1987). Umberto Cassuto’s The Documentary Hypothesis (1941) is worth considering as well, being from a Jewish scholar.

4. If anyone should reply, “Why, then, should we take this word to be of one, true God?” the first answer is also grammatical. Right from the start, it is routinely coupled with the verb in the singular, as in the words of Genesis 1:1: “God created … (ברא אלהים).

5. Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 345.