[KSA]

Originally Posted by Thankful Jane

I have not closely followed this thread, but I have a few thoughts as a result of reading Mike's post that I would like to share. These somewhat tie the doctrinal understanding together with the experiential understanding.

Dear Jane, it is a very good post! And you are right - our doctrinal understanding should always go together with our experience. This is why I think that this thread is not just intellectual game; our understanding of God affects our experience.

One is that maybe we are wrong to characterize Christ's experience when he cried out "My God, my God why has thou forsaken me?" as being God turning His back on Christ or leaving Him. I think it is very possible that their fellowship, previously unbroken by anything, was broken in those hours that He bore the penalty of our sins as a man. Can't we understand this to be similar to the same way that we have Christ in us, but we can at times feel forsaken and even cry out like this. (I think that this is typically due to sin somewhere in our lives.)

Yes, God never turned His back on Christ. Moreover, the Word says that when Christ was mortified in the flesh, He was being enlivened in the Spirit. But Jesus as the Son of Man lost the sense of God's presence to taste the consequences of sin for our sake.

Another thought is that the danger in modalistic bent teachings, in which the distinctions among the three are minimized or reduced or removed or blended, is that this carries over to our relationship with God. Modalistic beliefs inevitably end up also removing the distinction between us and God. We can fall into the distinction-blurring and distinction-removing error of believing that we are "becoming" Him. This opens up a pandora's box of misunderstanding that will hurt our relational walk with Him, our proper understanding of personal and distinct accountability, etc.

Actually methinks that many who criticize the so-called modalistic theology never bothered to study it. Therefore, they often fight against a straw man. Modalism does not deny the distinction between the Son and the Father. It just explains the distinction in a different way. And as the Scripture is not very clear about these distinctions (orthodox explanation does not come from the Word, but from Greek philosophy), I do not think we should be very dogmatic about it. It is disingenuous to doom modalists for hell, just because of different understanding. After all, the majority of those who claim to be orthodox in their understanding of theology have very vague idea about what Trinitarian theology really is. BTW, "becoming God" was not taught by modalism, it was taught by Trinitarian church fathers.

Another is concerning the will of Jesus being subservient to the will of God. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are perfectly of one will. When God became flesh in Christ He also had a human will. Could it not have been his human will that submitted to the will of God. He said that He intercedes for us as a sympathetic high priest tempted in all points like as we are. He set the example for us in His life of the way to walk with His human will one with the Father's which was constant fellowship with His Father. This is the same way we are to walk.

Exactly my view.