Unmasked

Creeps and Scoundrels: Modalism

A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to St John:

I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you […]

These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, ‘I go away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I go to the Father; for the Father is greater than I […]

When the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses, because you have been with me from the beginning.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

David Bentley Hart, on the Trinity:

The calculus of the infinite is absolute: The finite can never reach the infinite, the created can never aspire to its transcendent source, and nothing—no economically reduced manifestation of the God-head, no […] mediating principles, no conceptual Tower of Babel erected upon the foundations of the human spirit—can unite us with God save that God in His mercy condescend to unite us to Himself, by becoming one of us. If the Son saves us by joining us to the Father, then the Son must necessarily be, in every sense, God of God, essentially and infinitely.

But, then again, how are we joined to the Son? By the Holy Spirit—in the sacraments and corporate life of the Church and in His sanctifying work within the soul—and so the Spirit too, it follows, must be God of God, no less than the Son. Only God can join us to God, and so we must affirm that in the incarnation of the Son and actions of the Spirit God Himself is in our midst. Or rather, more wonderfully, we are in the midst of God, and the movement of relation among the three divine Persons, as it is unfolded through salvation history, is nothing less than the triune God drawing us into the infinite splendor of His life.

Trinitarian doctrine, then, is not merely an abstract metaphysics forcibly imposed from above upon the more spontaneous and vital experiences of the Church (though it most certainly requires and gives shape to a number of profound metaphysical conclusions); it is first and foremost [an] articulation of the Church’s experience of being made one in Christ with God Himself.

Here ends the reading.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Welcome, for the fifth and final time, to “Creeps and Scoundrels,” our Lenten look at the Christian heresies which have shaped Christian orthodoxy. They’ve all revolved around Jesus, you’ll note: whether He’s too Jewish or not Jewish enough; whether He’s all God and no man, or all man and no God.

I’ve saved the best for last, not in that it’s the most popular nor oft-debated of heresies, but because it’s the one of which I get accused most often: Modalism. What’s that? You’ve never heard of Modalism? Well, hopefully you’ve heard of the doctrine of which it attempts to make some sense: that is, the Holy Trinity.

Trinity is a churchy word. In general it means “triad” or “threefold,” but in theological jargon it refers to the Triple-Unity of God; that is, the understanding of deity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God in Three Persons. Casual critics of Christianity are quick to point out that the arithmetic here does not appear to work. “One does not equal three,” they say, to which we can only respond, “Really? We had no idea! Pack it up, boys; our math was off.”

Tonight I intend to touch upon three things regarding the Church’s understanding of God as Trinity: (1) it is not uniquely Christian; (2) it follows logically from the witness of our Scriptures; and (3) it is indeed all about Jesus.

So first up: the Trinity is not something that Christians wove out of the aether. Most religious traditions have a mystical understanding of God as both Three and One. Plato refers to the One God as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, of which all our experiences of goodness, truth, and beauty here below are but pale reflections. Hinduism understands the highest divinity as Trimūrti or “three forms”: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer, are in fact One God.

Islam is famously one of the world’s most staunchly monotheistic faiths, yet Muslim mystics speak of God as Consciousness, Being, and Bliss, Three in One. And Judaism, the root from which our own faith springs, often spoke of divine multiplicity: as the Wisdom of God coming to earth both as Word and Spirit. That should sound very familiar. Christian concepts of Trinity arose from Second Temple Judaism and from Jewish interpretations of Greek philosophy.

So if it sounds weird for Christians to speak of God as Three in One, we’re far from alone. This pattern, in fact, appears to be written into the universe, or at least our collective human subconscious, so that we keep rediscovering it time and again. Even Taoism has a sort of trinity, as do the modern mythologies of Marvel and DC. And don’t even get me started on the Triple Goddess of Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

The second thing about the Trinity is that it is, in fact, biblical. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit keep showing up in the Scriptures, to say nothing of Sophia, Holy Wisdom. And one cannot avoid the clear divinity credited to Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The question then becomes: How are they divine? Are they God in the fullest, truest sense? Or are they just way up high in the hierarchy, beyond the realms of angels? In short, are they part of the Creation, or are they truly the Creator?

We must follow the logic of salvation. For the early Christians, the early Church, salvation was nothing less than union with God, what we call theosis or deification. Jesus joins us to God, joins us in God, so that the Spirit of God—which is to say, His life, His breath—runs in our lungs and our veins. And I ask you: Can a creature join us to God? Can the finite reach up to the infinite?

The answer is no, clearly no. Only God can join us to God. Only God can make us into gods. Thus if Jesus saves us, as we know He does, and if we are joined to Him by His Spirit, as we know we are, then the Spirit and the Son must be true God. That’s it. That’s the whole argument. Either God saves us or no-one does. So we know, logically, from our experience, our salvation, and our Scriptures, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God, who joins us to Him in Jesus Christ.

Now, we get into trouble when we try to suss out how this all works metaphysically. To be clear, there are not three gods. Logically, philosophically, there can only be One God; for if there were more than one, each would have to lack something to distinguish it from the other, and God by definition lacks nothing. Nor are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit parts of God, as though we had to assemble Him from constituent pieces. If God is made up of parts, then He relies upon those parts to exist, and if God relies upon anything then He simply is not God.

Enter Modalism. Modalism is the notion that the One God wears different hats, plays different roles, dons different masks, in order to act out parts as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When God fulfills this role, we call Him Father; when acts that way, we call Him Son, just as one man can be a husband, a parent, and an employee. But the problem in Modalism is that the true God, God in Godself, remains hidden backstage behind the characters whom He acts out. So Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not who God is, not really—they’re just the masks that He wears.

I’m accused of Modalism whenever I emphasize the Oneness of God; not by you good people, of course, but by certain colleagues and interlocutors online. Yet Modalism doesn’t simply claim that God is One; it also denies that He is Three. Or more accurately, it denies that the Three are real, that they are God in the fullest sense.

Part of our problem here, I truly believe, stems from poor translation. We’re so used to the English formula “One God in Three Persons” that we assume that’s what the Church Fathers actually taught in the Greek. But they didn’t. The doctrine of the Trinity teaches that God is One Substance in Three Underlying Realities: that the Father is truly God, that the Son is truly God, that the Spirit is truly God, and that these Three truly are One.

So that when we encounter the Father as infinite, transcendent, eternal, unknowable, that’s really and truly God, not some mask, not some role. It’s really Him. And when we encounter the Son as one of us, as a fully human being, that’s really and truly God as well; not some representative but actually God in the flesh. And when we encounter the Holy Spirit in community, in the cosmos, in Word and in Sacrament, in the love of our neighbor, She is truly God as well.

All Three are One God. There is no disguise, no dilution, no diminishment at all. They are all true experiences, true encounters, with the One God. “Persons” is a terrible translation. It makes God sound like a committee that always happens to agree. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not separate persons as we might imagine, with differing wills and dreams and personalities. Rather, they are Three Realities of One God. There’s a difference—all the difference in the world—between faces and masks.

Now, in good conscience I must point out that because the Three are Three Realities and not simply three experiences—as Modalism would purport—it follows that the Trinity isn’t simply God as we encounter Him but God as He truly is, God in Godself. God was always Trinity, always Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s true that the Trinity is an analogy, a doctrine, and that God will always be greater than our ideas of God can be. But analogies are not false. They’re truths that point beyond themselves to the infinitely greater Truth.

An analogy is not the same as a bad metaphor. The Trinity is not a shamrock. The Trinity is not water found in liquid, ice, and steam. The Trinity is not three persons in the limited human sense, nor is the Trinity one actor playing different roles onstage. Imagine it like this: God is an infinite eternal act of Being. “I Am that I Am.” In the same eternal moment of His Being, God Knows: Knows Himself, and therefore knows all. And God loves what He knows, loves what He is, and that Love is also God.

Existence, Knowledge, and Love; Consciousness, Being, and Bliss; the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; Maker, Preserver, Destroyer; Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; One God come to us in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is God’s Image. He could never be God’s mask.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

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