Theopedia

Modalism

Definition

Modalism is the belief that God is a single divine person who appears successively as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rather than three distinct persons who exist together and act at the same time.1 On this view, God is Father in one period or relation and the same one person is Son in another, and Spirit in a further one; he never exists as Father, Son, and Spirit simultaneously.1 The position takes its common name, also called Sabellianism, from Sabellius, a third-century teacher who developed it, though the same basic error appeared under earlier teachers before him.2

Historical Origin

Modalism’s basic move, that Father, Son, and Spirit name successive relations of one divine person rather than three distinct persons, predates the teacher whose name it usually carries. Praxeas taught a similar position in Asia Minor around AD 200, prompting Tertullian’s treatise Against Praxeas; Noetus of Smyrna, writing around AD 230, held that the Father himself was born, suffered, and died, a position opponents named patripassianism, from the Latin for “the Father suffers.”3 Sabellius, a presbyter of Ptolemais writing in the middle of the third century, adopted and developed these earlier Monarchians’ teaching, holding that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three names for one and the same being, three successive stages of a single divine person he called Huiopatōr: God as Father and Creator, then as Son and Redeemer, then as Holy Spirit and Vivifier.2 The position bears his name today, though he did not originate it.2

Core Tenets

Modalism affirms, correctly, that there is only one God, but denies that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct persons existing together. Sabellius held that the three names are distinguished only as successive “modes of activity or revelation” of a single divine being, not as really distinct persons.2 Barrett states the underlying logic plainly: “the one God is Father, and then he decides to become Son, and at another time Holy Spirit. He merely wears different masks when appropriate; he is not three persons but one person manifested in three ways.”1 Because the same one divine person is what becomes “Son” and bears the sufferings of the incarnation on this view, earlier adherents were called patripassians: on their own premises, the Father himself, not a distinct divine person, endured Christ’s sufferings.3

Confessional and Biblical Response

The confession states that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct “persons,” each “of one substance, power, and eternity.”4 Three persons sharing one undivided essence is a different claim from one person taking three successive forms, and Scripture presents the three acting together and distinctly, not one person appearing in three successive guises. At Jesus’s baptism the Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends on him “like a dove,” and the Father speaks from heaven, “This is my beloved Son” (Matt. 3:16-17): three persons acting at the same moment, not one person in three sequential appearances. The Great Commission baptizes disciples into one shared “name” belonging to “the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” together (Matt. 28:19), and Jesus tells the Jews, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), a claim Gill argues cannot mean one person, since that would have Christ saying the absurdity that he and himself are one, or that he and another are somehow the same single person.5 Augustine answers modalism’s own claim to protect God’s oneness directly: God’s simplicity does not mean “there is really only a nominal Trinity, without subsistent Persons; that is the notion of the Sabellian heretics.”1

Modern Forms

Bavinck traces a version of the same impulse recurring well after the patristic era: Joachim of Fiore and David Joris taught that the Trinity’s work unfolds across three successive historical periods, one for each person, and Michael Servetus, in the same era, “devoted his intellectual powers to repudiate the church’s doctrine of the Trinity” outright.2

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 5, “Is God Made Up of Parts? Simplicity.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  3. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 9, “The Holy Trinity,” question 99. ↩ ↩2

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩

  5. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 26, “Of the Unity of God.” ↩