Before You Begin
Thesis. Scripture reveals one supreme God, the Father, the fountain of all being; and His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, a distinct and literal divine Person — "begotten, not created," brought forth from the Father in the days of eternity, so far back as to be to us practically without beginning, yet "of the very substance and nature of God," possessing by inheritance the divine attributes and "life in Himself" (Micah 5:2; John 1:1; Heb. 1:3-5; John 5:26; Waggoner, "Christ and His Righteousness"). The Father and the Son are two distinct Persons, one in nature, mind, and purpose; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit and presence of the Father and the Son, Christ's own representative sent to dwell in His people. In the incarnation the Son emptied and veiled His glory and the independent use of His divine power — living by faith on the Father as we must — yet He never divested His deity, and He keeps His humanity forever as "the man Christ Jesus," our High Priest in our nature. He took the full fallen nature of the race, "the likeness of sinful flesh," tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin — for the difference between Christ and us was not the nature He bore but the life He lived: He was, from His birth, in full surrender to the Father, and never once consented to sin.
Method. After Haskell's Bible Handbook: ref → gloss, scannable; every doctrine established first from Scripture (Miller's Rule — the Bible defines its own terms), then corroborated by a central cloud of witnesses — the Advent pioneers and Ellen G. White, quoted VERBATIM and verified against the corpus. This study argues the historic ADVENT-PIONEER understanding of the Godhead — the supreme Father, the literal begotten divine Son, and the Spirit of God as the presence of the Father and the Son — and does NOT impose the later creedal-Trinity formula or any 'the pioneers evolved into Trinitarianism' narrative. Where a pioneer source cannot be quoted from the local corpus, the point rests on Scripture and on what CAN be verified; no history is asserted without a receipt.