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podcast 266 – Andrew Davis on church history, the Trinity, and modalism – Part 1

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In this episode we meet Andrew Davis, a dedicated student of the “church fathers” (early writers on Christian theology). We hear about his interesting spiritual journey, from a brush with the faith movement, to atheism, to Buddhism, to Calvinism, to a flirtation with Eastern Orthodoxy. And since his high-school years he’s been diligently reading these early Christian authors and with their help rethinking his understanding of biblical theology and christology.

He observes,

I think that most modern trinitarianism is fundamentally modalistic… the conception of the Trinity for most people, I think, is that God is one person who somehow is Father, Son, and Spirit, whether that’s manifesting himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, whether it’s eternally existing as those three, or they’re three names for the one person…

Notice that his point is about how recent trinitarians think, not about what they say. In my view he’s right, and not only about ordinary Christians. He’s saying that most are what I call “one-self” trinitarians, thought not necessarily of the high-falutin’ philosophical sort.

He talks about “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit,” his experience as a theology-exploring student at The Master’s University, how his reading of patristic literature affected how he thinks about “modalism,” his acceptance of the Nicene creed as a subordinationist, and his views on sola scriptura.

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1 thought on “podcast 266 – Andrew Davis on church history, the Trinity, and modalism – Part 1”

  1. This was a really great conversation. It was a few years ago that your post entitled, “Orthodox Modalism” grabbed my attention and made me realize that I was viewing God in what you called, “eternal, concurrent modalism.” I saw the problem and had to abandon it and tried for a while to be a three-self Trinitarian but retreated to just saying the Trinity was a mystery due to God’s manner of existence being so far beyond our way of existing. I suppose that is possible, but I became convinced that wasn’t the best reading of scripture. The Unitarian Subordinationist views of the early church fathers have some variance from one another but overall seemed much more biblically sound. More recently, your talk entitled (if I remember correctly) “The Immortal Dies?” made me question the logical consistency of a literal incarnation and it is still something I am looking into. Thanks again for all the time invested into this and I am eager to hear the second half of this talk.

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