The Adventist pioneers held that there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things — and one Lord Jesus Christ, His begotten Son, by whom are all things. The Father is the source; the Son is the express image of the Father, sharing fully in His nature, and stands as Mediator between God and men.

The Holy Spirit, in the pioneer view, is not a third distinct person of a triune Godhead, but the omnipresent Spirit of the Father and of the Son — the very means by which God draws near to His creation. The pioneers spoke freely against the creedal "trinity" formula they had inherited from the fallen churches, regarding it as a doctrine alien to plain scripture.

This position was held openly and uniformly through the lifetimes of James White, Joseph Bates, J.N. Andrews, Uriah Smith, and the wider pioneer body. It is the doctrinal soil out of which the Advent message grew.

The modern corporate Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches a trinitarian doctrine of the Godhead: three coeternal, coequal Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — who together comprise one God. The Son is held to be eternally existent, without beginning, and the Holy Spirit is described as a distinct divine Person.

This formulation was progressively introduced through the early twentieth century, articulated in works such as L. E. Froom's writings, and finally codified at the 1980 General Conference Session in Dallas as Fundamental Belief #2 ("The trinity"). The 1931 Church Yearbook had already adopted trinitarian phrasing some decades earlier; 1980 made it confessional.

The shift is well-documented in Adventist historical literature and represents a substantive departure from the position uniformly held by the founding generation.