I remember the first time that I heard Anthony Buzzard talk about Unitarianism. I won’t lie, I was impressed. He seemed like a worthy opponent. If anyone was going to refute the Trinity, it wasn’t the JWs, it was him. Now I listen to him and I shake my head at how bad his arguments are. Even his old arguments that seemed powerful really don’t carry that much weight.
I remember the first big thing I saw him in was his debate with Joseph Good against Michael Brown and James White. The big argument from Good and Buzzard was that Jesus Christ was an agent of God and he has certain rights that other human beings don’t have so it can give an impression of a divine status.
The argument of agency might work for a few verses but it doesn’t work for John 1. The more I read John 1, the more I see it as a huge refutation of agency. For example, if I’m in legal trouble, I would hire a lawyer to argue on my behalf. He would act as an agent. I would pay him, tell him what to do and he would argue for my interests. That’s an agent. However, he wasn’t my agent when I was 5, 12, or 19 years old. He became my agent when I hired him and assigned him to a task.
John 1 shows that in the beginning the Word was with God and the Word was God. Moses became an agent for God when God sent him to His people. Moses is never described as the Word who was with God from all eternity. One cannot be an agent from all eternity, especially when he was created at the incarnation like Buzzard thinks.
The agency argument is dead on arrival. John 1 is the absolute refutation for Buzzard and for Muslims who use agency. Buzzard doesn’t say John 1:1-18 was added later and Muslims can’t either since the Quran forces them to accept the Injeel(Surah 5:68) which includes John 1. I suppose the only way to be a consistent anti-Trinitarian is to be a liberal and say that the passage was added later. The problem with this is that no manuscripts support it and John is the best attested book of antiquity in terms of manuscripts. However if you’re a liberal, don’t expect devout Christians to take you seriously. Mind you, we don’t take Anthony Buzzard seriously either for his shallow exegesis of John 1 and other passages.
Anthony Buzzard likes to pat himself on the back and says that he’s a leper amongst the Christian community because he says the Shema. That’s not true at all, it’s because he refuses to take into account the rest of scripture, including John 1.
According to Sir Anthony, the Word of the first Chapter pf St John is not a distinct person, but a plan or blueprint of the future creation. This plan became human in the man Jesus of Nazareth.
To quote Sir Anthony himself: “In the beginning there was God’s grand design, and that declaration was with God, related to Him as His project, and it was fully expressive of God Himself.”
The fact that this opinion is singularly lacking in any early Christian belief, even the heretics such as the various Arian sects believed that Our Lord Jesus Christ was truly “before time and before the ages, full of grace and truth, God, the only-begotten, unchangeable”, does not seem to bother him and his ‘Restoration Fellowship’. Generally very odd.
If Jesus is God’s grand design, isn’t he basically still the human nature of God, or at least an attribute of God?
Some arians basically consider Jesus to be God in everything but name, considering that even they (sometimes) agree he created the earth