One Name for Father, Son, and Spirit

The theology that grew out of the Jesus Only controversy rejects the classical Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the belief that God exists eternally as three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, sharing one divine essence, in favor of a strictly unified conception of God in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are understood as titles or modes of the single person of Jesus Christ rather than as three eternally distinct persons. Oneness believers trace this understanding back to a much older current in Christian thought called modalistic monarchianism, associated with the early third century teacher Sabellius, and some Oneness writers describe their own doctrine as a rediscovery, through direct revelation at the 1913 camp meeting, of a teaching they hold was original to the earliest church rather than a genuinely new idea. Baptism is the doctrine's most visible practical marker: Oneness Pentecostal churches baptize specifically in the name of Jesus rather than using the Trinitarian formula, treating that specific wording as a matter of real doctrinal consequence rather than a minor variation in liturgical language, which is precisely the point on which the movement first broke from the wider Pentecostal and Christian mainstream in 1916.