All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism

by James E. Dolezal

Possibly the most influential advocate of social trinitarianism in recent decades has been the Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann. He is concerned that the older trinitarianism that conceives the three persons as three distinct manners of subsistence of the one divine substance erects an unacceptable God-behind-God scenario and is too near to the Sabellian heresy.42 He prefers instead to conceive the unity of the Godhead as the product of the perichoretic fellowship of the three persons. Perichoresis is the ancient teaching that argues that each of the three persons indwells and is interior to the others. Such is reflected in Jesus’s words in John 14:11, “I am in the Father and the Father in Me.” Each person has its distinct identity and being wholly in relation to the other two. Moltmann wants to say that this network of relations just is the unity of the Godhead. “In respect of the Trinity’s inner life,” he writes, “the three Persons themselves form their unity, by virtue of their relation to one another and in the eternal perichoresis of their love.”

I do not see how this avoids the very modalistic/sabellian heresy he seeks to dodge?? It seems that he fails to make the proper distinction between person/being of God and man, by conflating the human beings function in relationships with God as being in an eternal and unchanging sense, i.e.; His essence of divinity, which is eternal. Thus, he still has God acting in modes, or as some have put it, as the one actor putting on different mask. He just makes the concepts of relationships and love the foundation for the Godhead's unity, not the Divine essence...I think this is a bait-and switch