18th – early 19th century

The modern period: Clarke, the New England theologians, Schleiermacher and "Sabellian" interpretations

Berkhof traces in the 18th–19th centuries a departure from the classical doctrine of the Trinity in two directions. Samuel Clarke, in his work on the Trinity (1712), came close, according to Berkhof, to the Arian view: the Father is the supreme and only God, the Son receives his being by the elective will of the Father, the Spirit is subordinate to the Son. Some New England theologians rejected eternal generation, regarding the trinitarian names as designations of distinctions revealed in the work of redemption. In Swedenborg, Schleiermacher, Hegel and Dorner Berkhof finds Sabellian interpretations. Schleiermacher, according to Grenz and Olson, considered the doctrine of the Trinity useless for theology and placed only a brief note at the end of The Christian Faith.