ian Jaroslav Pelikan observed that the earliest Christian witness believed that the Lord Jesus Christ is the indwelling Holy Spirit, “… the use of Lord for the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 3:17, continued to require explanation even after the Trinitarian issues appeared settled.” Then in the very next paragraph (Pg. 185) Pelikan wrote, “Christ is constantly described as Spirit by the fathers, in virtue of His divine nature … The use of Spirit for the divine in Christ was prominent in those early Christian writings which still show the marks of the Jewish origins of Christianity.” (The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, Pg. 185, Jaroslav Pelikan)
Church historians agree that the later Semi-Arian writers who were influential in developing later Trinitarian ideas began to change the earlier Christian teaching of the apostles and their immediate successors from Christ as the Holy Spirit in order to promulgate their new idea of Christ being a god the word person out of John 1:1. Since the earliest Apostolic and post Apostolic Christians had taught that “the Lord (Christ) is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17), we know that the Trinitarian, Arian, and Unitarian Socinian doctrines could not be correct. For if the Holy Spirit is Christ, then there would be no third God Person of a three person deity. In like manner, Arians such as Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot explain how the Holy Spirit as an impersonal force could be the personal Christ who speaks through his Church (Acts 13:2; Luke 21:14-15); while Socinians cannot explain how the Holy Spirit which they believe to be the Father could be the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, only Oneness Theology brings perfect harmony to all of the scriptural data while other theological views do not!
Church historian J. N. D. Kelly further wrote,
“Ignatius even declares that He is 'our God' (Ephesians 8:2; Trallians 7:1), describing Him as 'God incarnate' (Ephesians 7:2; 19:3 – ‘en sari genomenos theos’) and 'God made manifest as man (theou anthrōpinōs phaneroumenou).' He was 'in spirit united with the Father'(Smyrna 3:3). In His pre-existent being 'ingenerate': (the technical term reserved to distinguish the increate God from creatures), He was the timeless, invisible, impalpable, impassible one Who for our sakes entered time and became visible, palpable and passible (Ephesians 7:2; Polycarp 3:2). His divine Sonship dates from the incarnation.” (JND Kelly Early Christian Doctrines, p.92).
Kelly accurately described Ignatius’ belief that the “timeless” and “increate” “invisible” Spirit of God “entered time” to become subject to sufferings through “His “Sonship” which “dates from the incarnation.” In other words, although Ignatius believed that the Sonship was dated to the incarnation through the virgin (having a beginning in time), he believed that the timeless, eternal Spirit of God became the “divine Son” only in “the incarnation.” Hence, Ignatius did not believe in a timeless God the Son of a three person deity. Ignatius’ theology was clearly Modalistic, as the One Spirit of the One God became incarnate as the Son in “the incarnation.”
Trinitarian apologists and scholars often state that God the Father could not be seen while the Son could be seen as an angel in the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet Ignatius as a respectable leader of the churches in Asia Minor and Syria believed that Jesus existed as the invisible Spirit of God Who “for our sakes became visible” when God also became a man in the flesh. Hence, there are two irrefutable facts about Ignatius’ testimony of the appearance of Jesus.
Fact 1: Since Ignatius was received as a great leader of the earliest Christians of the first and early second century, the vast majority of the Christian believers who lived during the last days of the original apostles would have believed in the same theology of Ignatius which was clearly Oneness or Modalistic.
Fact 2: According to the testimony of the earliest Christians (AD 67-108), Jesus could not have had a visible form or image which could be seen with human eyes before the incarnation actually occurred. Therefore the wor