The Heresy of Modalism

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171. The Heresy of Modalism

Calcedan position paper, number 203, August 1996.

Modalism, and its earlier form, monarchianism,

were Heresy's common to the early centuries of Christianity.

They are not commonly known in our time, because for centuries their existence was rather uncommon.

Now, in our time, we are seeing their reappearance, and there is a reason for it.

Many of the converts in the early church were pagan philosophers and thinkers.

They saw the biblical revelation as important and yet limited.

Their views of God were broader, and the Bible seemed to circumscribe God too much.

Areas, for example, in Thalia, saw God as unknowable, which meant that the Bible could neither truly nor fully reveal God.

Jesus Christ was the greatest of creatures, but not one with God.

For Areas, God was really in coherence.

For He is to Himself what He is, that is, unspeakable.

God was too great to be expressible.

Behind Areas, and the later monarchians and modilists, was a belief that God is the great and incoherent life force behind all things,

not more than marginally noble, and essentially unknowable.

He is a changing and evolving force whose nature is beyond our description.

For such a view, the biblical doctrine of the Trinity of the God, who gives us an inscriptured and unchanging revelation,

is a nathema.

This biblical God says,

I am the Lord, I change not. Malachi chapter 3, verse 6,

whereas this life force says, I change, and no man knows me, nor my name.

This means that we cannot use supposedly God's word to limit God.

One prominent evangelist who is hostile to theonomy and a fixed revelation has said that there can be 19 persons in the Godhead, not merely three.

This means a changing God, which implies a changing plan of salvation.

Indeed, in the Waka-my tradition, salvation in the Old Testament era was by law.

In the New Testament age, by grace, and in the coming time of the Spirit, by love.

This means a changing God, and an insufficient revelation.

Some new prophets may give us still another stage in God's evolution and progress.

A 20th century has seen a worldwide expansion of the Christian faith.

Any new converts bring with them ancient Eastern mystical faiths and vague doctrines of God.

Tribal religions also seek to accommodate Christianity to their presuppositions.

They see it as their task to open up Christianity to their ancient, quote-unquote, wisdom.

As a result, they object to systematic theology as a limitation on God.

Supposedly, systematic theology cannot understand the full revelation of the Godhead, though the meaning of the Trinity, and therefore, all such approaches are flawed.

This view signs respectful and sensible, but it is false.

True enough, man the creature cannot have an exhaustive knowledge of the eternal and infinite God, but he can still have a true and faithful knowledge.

The triune God is not a vague and changing life force, but the supreme and unchanging being.

His word declares him to be.

We therefore can know God truly through his word, even though our knowledge of him is not exhaustive, because God is consistent in all his being, and never is in contradiction to his revelation of himself.

Systematic theology is no deviation, but a necessity.

Only since Darwin and the shift to a changing, evolving God, have we seen this disregard for systematic theology.

This, in turn, has meant a weakness in faith and life within the churches.

In the early church, monarchy andism and modalism were, in effect, deviations from the strictness of revelation, and they have been described as monotheistic, I believe, in one person in the Godhead as against trinitarian.

This is only partially true.

Their forms of monotheism were a reaction against trinitarianism, and they were steps backward into an incoherent and formless God, an evolving force.

It is of interest that modern unitarianism very quickly became non-theistic.

Some monarchians, or Jesus Christ, as a vague power or force, rather than the incarnation of a divine person,

other thinkers in this school reduced Jesus Christ to God the Father, and God the Spirits and Manifestations of an essentially unknowable force.

The Trinity simply represented modes were by the unknowable for a time manifested itself.

It should be apparent now why modalism is again very much with us.

We have, first, peoples of various pagan cultures who have come into the church, sometimes to leave it, claiming to be the one true church, whose implicit doctrine of, quote, God and quote, is a being out there who is beyond our comprehension or beyond being comprehended more than dimly in the Bible.

Second, we have, in the 20th century, a generation of new barbarians who are the products of public education and the humanistic universities.

With arrogance and ignorance, they seek to reinvent Christianity as though wisdom were born with them.

As a result, they are seeing a return to ancient and ignorant heresies and to a blindness born of arrogance and pride.

Third, the hostility of systematic theology means that unchanging God is denied.

Because the God of Scripture who changes not is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and therefore true and faithful statements about Him are possible.

Although He cannot be known exhaustively, He can be known truly.

This means no new revelations nor new prophets and saviors, because the unchanging God is eternally self-consistent.

This is the glory of Orthodox faith and guard us against the pretenders to new revelations or to the one exclusively true church.

For modalists, the Trinity may be the quote truth and quote for one dispensation or era of history, but not for others.

Truth is replaced by relativism.

Thus, if any group or man tells us that the Trinity is to some degree only partly true or that systematic theology is not true,

we can thereby identify Him as espousing another religion, no matter how seemingly Christian His language.

He posits a life force behind the Trinity which manifests itself in one era with the Trinity, possibly Muhammad in another, and so on and on.

Modalism appears on the church seen as a heresy and it uses biblical terms to pass as Christian.

It is, however, implicitly another religion.

When it comes from Eastern religious backgrounds, its implicit view of God is of an unknown and unknowable force behind the Christian Trinity.

When its origin is modernism, the abandonments of the biblical forms is more open.

The revised view of God born of modernism and Darwinism is of an evolving and changing life force, modeless to the core.

Calbat, the catcher of heretics, refused to call God Almighty for Him.

The Almighty is bad as power in itself is bad. The Almighty means chaos, evil, the devil.

We could not better describe and define the devil than by trying to think this idea of a self-biased, free, sovereign ability.

In one sense, God is right in associating God's power exclusively with law.

Calbat, the mathematics and outline, New York, New York, philosophical library, 1949, page 48.

He was wrong, however, in separating omnipotence and the title Almighty from God and the seriously limited God if a God was at all in his thinking.

Having separated biblical, holy history from actual temporal history but reduced God to an idea and a mode of religious expression.

Without the Creator God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost and His inscriptured Word, there can be no systematic theology, no one changing truth.

We are then back to ancient paganisms, many truths, none of them binding to a changing God and a changing revelation, new prophets for new days and an abiding darkness in the minds of men.