CHURCH HISTORY for DUMMIES Class #16: Modalism

We now enter the beginning of the 4th century. Things are pretty stable as far as the church is concerned. Martyrdom is almost a thing of the past. Christians do not experience persecution as much as they did earlier. The emperor, Constantine, is a self-proclaimed Christian. Whether he really was or not, who knows? But he at least was sympathetic to the Gospel and the church. So there’s no heat or pressure coming down upon the church from the government. Outside the church, things have cooled off. Martyrdom and persecution is now a thing of the past.

But there is a problem within the church now. There are people who call themselves believers, they call themselves Christians, but they are confessing something different than what the church has proclaimed for the first 3 centuries.

In the 4th century, the main issue facing the church is this: How are we to understand the relationship between the and His Son, ? What is the relationship between the Father and the Son? Is the Son created by the Father? Is Jesus eternal or did He have a beginning point in time? Is the Son’s essence, His nature, the same essence and nature as the God the Father?

So, during the 2-4th centuries was struggling to reconcile the idea of a single God, as stated in Deuteronomy 6:4-

Deuteronomy 6:4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

- with the ending of Matthew’s Gospel which says-

Matthew 28:19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…

How is God one and yet we are called to baptize people in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit? So, some Christians struggled to understand and reconcile these 2 verses. One person, who we have already looked at, is Marcion. His answer was simple: do away with the Od Testament! Problem solved!

201 One of the answers to all these questions comes to us by a heresy known simply as Modalism.

It’s also know by other fancier names, such as-

* Modalistic * Patripassionism * * Praxeanism

Why all the extra names? Well, we know it by all of the extra names because it makes theologians and pastors sleep better at night because they know all the names of modalism!

So let’s define modalism: Modalism teaches that the Father is fully God, the Son is fully God, and the Spirit is fully God, nevertheless God manifests Himself in only one such “mode” at a time.

God is not simultaneously Father, Son, and Spirit. Modalism asserts that sometimes God is the Father, sometimes God is the Son, and sometimes God is the Spirit, but He never exists as three persons sharing the same nature or essence. That’s why we call it modalism. God exists in one mode at any given moment.

Sometimes you’ll see it called because it stresses the “one rule” of God. Like a “monarch,” a single king or queen, who rules over a kingdom. The idea is that God is one, and that’s all He is. He’s just one Person, not three Persons.

And sometimes you’ll see it called Patripassionism because those who hold it believe that it was God the Father who suffered on the cross.

Patri = father Passion = suffering, death (Like the movie “The Passion of the Christ”)

Sabellius

And sometimes you’ll see it called Sabbelianism because a man named held this view.

202 We don’t know much about Sabellius. He was a priest and theologian who was excommunicated in A.D. 220 for his false beliefs concerning God.

Sabellius taught party line modalism: there is one God and sometimes He wears the “mask” of the Father or the son or the Spirit, depending on the situation. Hippolytus, who was one of the Apologists, was an early opponent of Sabellius. He tells us that Sabellius divided God up into 3 roles which he demonstrated in history. Sabellius used the analogy of the sun to describe God.

The sun gives off light and heat, even though it is just one source. So too, said Sabellius, the one God is sometimes a different person depending on the situation. In the Old Testament, we see God the Father, in the Gospels we see the Son, and in the lives of believers now, we see the Spirit.

Where did Sabellius get his ideas? From the Bible! For instance, in John 14-

John 14:8–9 Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?

Sabellius said, “See! If you’ve seen Jesus, then you’ve seen the Father. The same God, same essence, same nature. Just a different manifestation or mode of the one God.”

So through the 2nd and 3rd centuries we have strains of modalism popping up.

Praxeas

Finally, we see another version, which you’ll sometimes see called Praxeanism If we rewind to the end of the 2nd century and leading into the 3rd century, there is an individual by the name of , who gives us insight into this belief.

We don’t know much about Praxeas, but he was very influential in the church in Rome.

And (160-220 A.D.), who we looked at quite a bit, campaigned against this false teaching in his work titled Against Praxeas. Here’s what Tertullian said about Praxeas:

203 In various ways has the devil rivaled and resisted the truth. Sometimes his aim has been to destroy the truth by defending it. He maintains that there is one only Lord, the Almighty Creator of the world, in order that out of this doctrine of the unity he may fabricate a heresy. He says that the Father Himself came down into the Virgin, was Himself born of her, Himself suffered, indeed was Himself Jesus Christ…By this Praxeas did a twofold service for the devil at Rome: he drove away prophecy (preaching), and he brought in heresy; he put to flight the Paraclete (the Holy Spirit), and he crucified the Father.

Praxeas was a modalist who believed that God the Father became the as the Incarnate Word, entered the Virgin Mary, was born, lived and suffered a brutal death on the cross. It was God the Father who did all of this. Praxeas believed in the oneness of God, but only the oneness of God.

So what does Tertullian mean when he says, “In many ways has the devil rivaled truth, sometimes his aim has been to destroy it by defending it.”

What does Tertullian mean? He means that you can be an enemy of the truth if you only seek to defend one aspect of it. If the truth is A and B, and you seek only to defend A, but not B, then you are not defending the truth. You are destroying it.

As Tertullian says about Praxeas, “He maintains that there is one only Lord, the Almighty Creator of the world, in order that out of this doctrine of the unity he may fabricate a heresy.”

Praxeas was all for monotheism; all for the idea that there is one God. One Lord. He believes that this is central to Christianity. He was a strict monotheist. One God. But he was not in favor of a Triune understanding of God. He did not believe in the .

So what Tertullian tells us is that Praxeas’ belief in monotheism can lead to a heretical belief, because if all you do is stress the oneness of God and the unity of God, then you’re not really telling the truth. If all you do is stress God’s oneness, then you’re talking about some god, but you’re not talking about the Christian God. If all you do is stress God’s oneness, then you are no different from Praxeus…or a Jew or a Muslim. That’s what Judaism and Islam stress: one God. However, Christianity is distinctively Trinitarian. The God of Christianity is not just a God of unity, He is also a God of Trinity.

204 So if all that you are is a strict monotheist, then you believe in something, but you do not believe in the God of the Bible.

Back to what Tertullian said-

He says that the Father Himself came down into the Virgin, was Himself born of her, Himself suffered, indeed was Himself Jesus Christ.

Praxeas believed that the Father became Jesus Christ in the flesh. The Father, as Jesus, was born in Bethlehem. The Father, as Jesus, played on a t-ball team. The Father, as Jesus, was in Boy Scouts. It was the Father who, as Jesus, died on the cross.

So you can already smell the error, right? The heresy of Praxeas is this: there is only 1 person in the Godhead, the Father. And the Father sometimes manifests Himself as the Son, all the while still remaining the Father. So there are not 3 eternal Persons in the Godhead- Father, Son, and Spirit- who co-exist eternally with one another. There’s just one. The Father is alone and unique and exclusive to the Godhead. That’s Praxeas’ view of God.

What god does this sound like? It sounds like Allah, the god of Muslims. Alone. Exclusive. So, Allah has to create in order to be himself, in order to love.

But the Triune God of Christianity- Father, Son, and Spirit- did not need to create because He was complete in Himself. God had no needs in eternity past. He did not need anything or anyone. He did not need to create anything in order to be God. He was complete within Himself. And it is this God, who is complete in Himself and having no need, it is this God that decides to create the world.

God did not create out of any need. So why did God create? The answer: God created out of His Triune love in order to share that love with others, in contrast to the god of Islam.

The Triune God creates out of the overflow of His eternal love, and we were made to enjoy and respond to this love. We were made, we were created, to get swept up in the love that exists between God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. This is why God created humanity: so that we would be swept away by His eternal love and glorify Him and enjoy Him forever.

205 But this poses a few questions: Because the Triune God is a loving, giving, and sharing God, did He need to create in order to be loving, giving, and sharing? Did God have to create in order to experience love? Did God only become loving after He created? Did He create humanity so that He would have someone to love? The answer to all of these questions is an emphatic “No!”

God did not need to create in order to love! The Triune God has been loving for all eternity! God the Father has been loving His Son Jesus, in the Spirit, for all of eternity! Loving others is not some strange thing for God! Loving others did not start in Genesis 1. God has been loving for all of eternity because God is love (1 John 4:9,16).

Now, standing in stark contrast to the Triune God of Christianity is Allah, the exclusive and all alone god of Islam. Allah is said to have 99 names or titles, which describe him as he is in all of eternity. And one of those names/titles is “The Loving.” Think about that. One of Allah’s names is “The Loving.”

But how could Allah be loving in eternity past? Before he created anything, according to Islam, Allah was all alone. He’s all alone, so how could he love? There’s no one to love! He was by himself! Allah could only love if he created something. That means that Allah is dependent on his creation in order to be who he is!

Allah cannot be “The Loving” unless he has someone to love. So he has to create in order to be who he is. He has to create in order to live up to his name. He has to create in order to be “The Loving.” Therefore, Allah is dependent on his creation in order to be who he is. And one of the cardinal truths of Islam is that Allah is dependent on nothing.

But Allah is dependent! Contrary to what Islam teaches, Allah is dependent on created beings. Allah needs creation in order to be who he claims to be! He needs creation in order to love, in order to live up to one of his names/titles. He needs creation in order to be “The Loving.”

And so, Michael Reeves says, “Therein lies the problem: how can a solitary God be eternally and essentially loving when love involves loving another?... Such are the problems with nontriune gods and creation. Single-person gods, having spent eternity alone, are inevitably self-centered beings, and so it becomes hard to see why they would ever cause anything else to exist. Wouldn’t the existence of a universe be a frustrating distraction for the god whose greatest pleasure is looking in a mirror? Creating just looks

206 like a deeply unnatural thing for such a god to do. And if such gods do create, they always seem to do so out of an essential neediness or desire to use what they create merely for their own self-gratification.” (Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith, p. 40-41)

But this is not true of the Christian faith! We believe in a Triune God! We are Trinitarian! We believe in one God, eternally existing in three Persons: Father, Son, and Spirit. So it is not unnatural for the Trinity to love. It’s normal! Loving others is not some new or novel thing that happened with God when He created the world. God has always been loving! God the Father has been loving His Son Jesus, in the Spirit, for all of eternity!

And that’s why God is not first seen as Creator! God has first and foremost revealed Himself, not as Creator or Ruler of the Universe, but first and foremost as Father! God has first and foremost revealed Himself as a loving heavenly Father! He is God the Father. And being a Father means that God has an eternal Son whom He loves: Jesus.

And being a Son means that Jesus has a Father whom he loves! And God the Father and were loving each other, through God the Holy Spirit, in eternity past- long before He ever created anything!

So in eternity past, Jesus the Word was enjoying close and deep fellowship and love with God the Father, but not so with Allah. Allah was alone. All that Allah had at his side was a book: the Quran.

According to Islam, Allah had an eternal word at his side, the Quran. Now, on the surface it looks like Allah was not lonely because he had a book with him. But that’s all that it was- a book. And it was a book about him! Just a book about his wants and wishes. A book about him. And there was no one for Allah to love. All that he had in eternity past was a book.

Now, I know what you introverts (like me!) who love to read are thinking: “That would be Heaven! Me, all alone, no one to bother me, no one to talk to, and all I have with me is a book! A book to read and enjoy all by myself? Glory! Glory!” And all the introverts said, “Amen!”

That was Allah in eternity past- living the dream of every introvert who loves to read.

207 But when you read Hebrews 1:3, and you read the phrase that Jesus is “the radiance of the glory of God” you see a picture of the Christian God who was not alone in eternity past. You see a picture of the Trinitarian God who reveals Himself not just through a mere book with pages, but through His Word- through the Word, through His Son Jesus.

Understand this: In Christianity, the Word is not just a book. The Word is not just a book with ink and pages and chapters and footnotes and a preface. The Word is a person! The Word is a person- Jesus- who has always been in God’s presence! Jesus has always been close by His Father.

So when God gives us His Word, He doesn’t just give us a book- He gives us Himself! He gives us Jesus, His beloved eternal Son, the perfect revelation of His Father. He doesn’t give us information, or rules, or interesting tidbits about Himself, or what His idiosyncrasies are- He gives us Jesus! He gives us Himself!

God is love (1 John 4:16). Love is His essence. So that means that the Triune God that we serve is in essence not a law-giver, but a lover. In His essence, God is a person who loves, not one who gives laws for people to obey.

God is fundamentally love. Now, I know that makes some of us uncomfortable to talk about God being love in His essence. It makes some of us uncomfortable because we’re afraid that if we stress God’s love too much, then we’re on a fast track to liberalism and a social gospel. We’re afraid that if we stress God’s love too much then obedience goes out the window. So it makes some Christians uneasy to talk about God being love in His very essence. We’re afraid that we’ll get a “mushy Gospel” if we start talking about God’s love all the time.

I think our default mode is to think of God as this Supreme Ruler who’s hard as nails. Like His default mode is to be cranky because nobody is keeping the rules. And so we envision God as this curmudgeon who only cares about the rules- like before He is anything else, He has to be a cranky, harsh taskmaster.

But God is not first and fundamentally a law-giver. He is first a lover. Before God ever gave the law to anyone, what was He doing? He was loving! Before God was the Creator or Ruler, He was a Father loving His Son Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, in eternity past.

So before there was anything to rule, God was loving His Son. Before there were any rules to pass out, God was loving His Son.

208 So love came before the law, even though the law is an expression of His moral character. Before God created and ruled, before He was a law-giver, He was loving His Son who was with Him. And His great love for His Son led Him to send His Son, the Word.

So we serve a God that doesn’t just happen to speak. He doesn’t just speak words. He doesn’t just communicate to communicate. He is the Word. This is how Jesus fulfills and executes His office as prophet- He is the Word spoken.

He is communicative, He reveals, He shares, He does not hoard, He moves out to others. To say that God speaks, to say that God expresses Himself through His Word, through Jesus the Son, means that God is the ultimate extrovert! God is most alive when He is in community- loving and sharing and giving! And God has been in community within the Godhead for all of eternity. And as the greatest extrovert, God could not be a recluse. He must enjoy closeness with others. He must love because He is love. And He must speak. He must communicate. And for all of eternity God has been speaking through His Word, through His Son Jesus.

And He doesn’t just speak information. God speaks Himself! He gives Himself! He gives us Jesus, who is the radiance of the glory of God! So the fountain of God’s love for His Son brimmed over in giving His Son. His love, His essence, overflowed the banks.

So Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory, meaning, He shows us what God the Father is like. Jesus shows us that God the Father is love; that he is outgoing and loves to share the love that He has for His Son with others. Jesus is proof of that. Jesus is proof that the Trinitarian God is not an introvert! Jesus is proof that God is love!

And that’s why we must first see God as a loving Father and not as a law-giver or rule-enforcer. And that’s why John Owen said, “We are never nearer Christ than when we find ourselves lost in holy amazement at His unspeakable love.”

You will never be nearer to Jesus than when you find yourself totally flabbergasted that He loves a rebellious sinner like you. You will never be nearer to Jesus than when you find yourself totally awestruck that He loves you. And when you do find yourself close to Jesus because you are overwhelmed at His love, then guess what? You’ll want Him. You’ll desire Him. He will be your Treasure, your exceeding joy (Psalm 43:4).

209 When you come to grips with His crazy, out of this world love for you, you’ll actually start enjoying Him- you’ll start enjoying God.

And this is what you lose with modalism. There is no Trinitarian God loving in eternity past and then creating humans to share that love with. All that goes out the window with Modalistic Monarchianism, Patripassionism, Sabellianism, and Praxeansim. The eternal love of God is gone. POOF!

But Orthodox Trinitarianism teaches us that God the Father sends His Son, the Word, because He loves and gives and shares and does not hoard. And Jesus the Son images forth the Father in loving His elect people and giving His life for them, and then sharing His life with us through the Holy Spirit. So when you hear the words Trinity, Trinitarian, and Triune, you need to immediately think of a God who is love- a God who is not stingy and does not hoard. When you read the words “the radiance of the glory of God,” in Hebrews 1:3, you should immediately think of a God who is love, and loves to love, and loves to share, and loves to give.

That’s what it means that Jesus is the radiance of the glory of God. He is one with the Father and he shines forth the Father, images forth the Father. Jesus reveals God the Father to us. He reveals to us the glory of God. He radiates the glory of God.

Please understand that. What is God like fundamentally, foundationally? Is He the Creator, the Ruler first? No. That’s what Praxeas stressed. Is God first and foremost the Law-giver? No. God is not primarily a law-giver. God is not primarily one who lays down the law; who barks out a bunch of rules. He is first and fundamentally a Father. He is a loving Father. He is love.

If you view God first and foremost as a law-giver, then that’s how you will relate to Him. You will always be trying to keep the rules to please Him in order to get His favor. You’ll always be trying hard to make sure you stay in line instead of enjoying Him as He is: a loving Father. Before the foundation of the world, God was not a law-giver, He was a Father loving His Son, in the Spirit. That is who God is essentially.

And seeing God that way will change everything about your Christian life.

Remember, the most important thought that you will ever think is what you think when you think of God because it will determine every dimension of your life.

210 This is why the nation of Israel went into exile! They viewed God differently than He had revealed Himself in His word. They thought they could worship idols alongside Yahweh. What they thought of God determined every dimension of their life.

And it’s the same for us too.

Viewing God as being essentially love, a loving Father, and not first a Rule-maker or a law-giver, will change everything about your Christian life. It will make you want Him. It will make you desire Him. It will make you long to be with Him. It will make you want to pleas Him.

Modalism Today

What denomination today believes in modalism? United Pentecostals. They flat out deny the Trinity. They believe that sometimes the one God is Father, sometimes He is the Son, or sometimes He is the Spirit.

United Pentecostals are sadly deceived.

To be a Christian you have to be able to count to three. Is there one God? Yes. And He exists as three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So counting to one is not enough! To be a Christian you have to be able to count to three.

This is what our doctrinal statement says:

B. The Trinity We believe that there is one living and true God, eternally existing in three persons; that these are equal to every divine perfection, and that they execute distinct but harmonious offices in the work of creation, providence and redemption. Genesis 1:1, 26; Matthew 28:19; John 1:1, 3; 4:24; Romans 1:19-20

To be a member of this church, you have to believe this. To be a Christian you have to believe this!

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