Today is Trinity Sunday and Father’s Day. And the pastor explained
the Trinity using the same modalist model that he used a few years ago
(see here):
in the same way that a father can be one person with three different
roles—-father, grandfather, and son—-so likewise is God one person with
three different roles, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our liturgy also
said that God revealed himself in three separate ways, Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.
As I wrote a few years ago, my church is Presbyterian, so it most
likely believes that the Godhead contains three persons, as opposed to
being one person who performs three roles. Maybe my pastor understands
what he’s saying differently from how I am understanding him. That
happens.
During church today, I was thinking about what Karen Armstrong says about the Cappadocian fathers in her book, A History of God.
I just now looked at the pages in which she discusses their
understanding of the Trinity, on pages 115-117. She focuses on Gregory
of Nyssa. According to her, Gregory of Nyssa believed that God is one,
but that God manifests Godself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
and we experience God in those ways: we experience the Father as
transcendent, the Son as creative, and the Holy Spirit as immanent. The
one God’s very essence, however, is “unnameable and unspeakable”
(Gregory’s words, according to whatever translation Karen Armstrong is
using). The Trinity is how God reveals himself to us, not how God truly
is in terms of his essence.
That doesn’t sound too different from what my pastor and the church’s
liturgy were saying: there is one God, who manifests himself, and whom
we experience, in three separate ways. But I doubt that the
Cappadocians were modalists. How were they different from modalists,
then? And is Karen Armstrong conceptualizing Gregory of Nyssa’s
position correctly?