When studying the Trinity one of the issues that comes up is modalism. Modalism is ostensibly a heresy. It says that God exists in three 'modes of being', rather than 'as three persons'. This is a problem because it denies the individuality of the varying parts of the Trinity. It also brings into question whether the wholeness of God was poured into the man Jesus.
The Trinity grew out of a problem with the Incarnation. If the wholeness of God was present in the man Jesus, then who was running the universe when Jesus was alive? The God just cease to exist in Heaven. That, indeed, would seem absurd. Yet the idea that the One True God of monotheism, poured the whole of Himself into Jesus is important to maintain the salvific significance of the Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection. The positing of multiple persons, who are distinct yet each wholly God, became necessary to make full sense of the Incarnation, or rather to maintain the salvific significance of the event.
The Bible gives us raw experience of God, it is pure data. Theology tries to make formulas of the data. The central New Testament convictions are: sin makes it impossible for man to save himself or for us to be saved by any human being, only God can save us, Jesus was a human being, and in and through Jesus we are saved. Add to that the Old Testament convictions about the oneness of God, and you see how the problems develop. There is no way to make sense of all this without complexity of thought. The Trinity is the linguistic expression of the tension.
Modalism is a problem, because if God exists in three modes of being, then it seems to deny the full humanity of Jesus and/or the fullness of Divinity within Him. The idea that the One God of the Old Testament is the only one who could save us and yet in Jesus, a man, God saved us is just the center of the experiential encounter with God that the New Testament reflects upon and reveals.
But some of this disappears if we drop the substance ontology that our language is generally tied into. We think and talk in terms of substances and essences. There is a thing, and through investigation and reflection we can find the essence of that thing, as it is, isolated from everything else. But modern physics tells us that 'things' are really 'events', collections of relationships whose intersections manifest to us AS things. When ball is thrown, we think in terms of the thing "ball" and the action it is involved in, "thrown". But as a chemistry teacher pointed out to me years ago, the ball thrown is a different 'thing' than the ball at rest. A ball thrown has a wavelength and frequency, and has a different mass. Energy and matter are one, the energy of the thrown-ness and the mass of the ball are interchangeable. The ball thrown is not "a ball thrown" but "a ball possessing thrown-ness", a quality the ball at rest totally lacks.
So while chronological modalism (the idea that God is 'sometimes' the son and 'sometimes' the Holy Spirit) is clearly problematic, functional modalism is not. For if God acts in three 'modes' then those very actions create three separate realities. The God acting as revealer/redeemer is a unique individual, distinguishable clearly from God acting as 'inspirer' or God acting as 'creator'. Yet just as the ball thrown is still the ball that was at rest, this God who ALWAYS acts in these three modes remains the same God. One God acting in three different ways all the time is One God who can exist AS three individuals.
Relations and actions are no different than what we normally take to be 'substances'. If one God acts eternally in three personal ways, and can be related to in three distinct personal relations, then that God just IS three different persons. The real problem becomes the paradoxical understanding of how action and relation change something and yet we can still conceive of that something being the same. The ball at rest is a fundamentally different reality than the ball thrown. Yet it is still the same ball! The important thing is that the Trinity then becomes an instantiation of a more global philosophical problem. No one has yet been able to make logical or philosophical sense of how we can conceive of what science is telling us about relations being truly fundamental. But it should be clear, then, that the Trinity is not a particular problem for Christians, but part of a global problem for anyone who wants to fundamentally understand anything at all. Once we realize that relational-actional ontology is true, and substance ontology is false, problems arise in conceiving the former AS true, even if we know it is true. But that is a problem for EVERYBODY, not just the Trinitarian.
God is as God does. God always acts and does in three distinct, personal ways. Yet it is still the one God who acts. The ball thrown is a fundamentally different reality than the ball at rest. Yet it is still the same ball. I suggest to you that these two paradoxes are equivalent. So functional modalism ceases to be heretical but the Trinity does not cease to be a problem, but is shown to be a particular instantiation of a larger problem any thoughtful 21st century person has to struggle with. But that is assuming my analyses here is right. And it could be wrong, I could always be wrong.
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