Blake Ostler, Re-vision-ing the Mormon Concept of Deity

I have recently re-read an important article from Blake Ostler (be sure to check out the Exploring Mormon Thought podcast):

Re-vision-ing the Mormon Concept of Deity

Among other things, it is a devasting refutation of the claim early Mormon theology was that of "Modalism." We also get this great response to Dan Vogel's nonsense where he tries desperately to answer 3 Nephi presenting the Father and Son as numerically distinct persons (Vogel is good at collecting documents [cf. his 5-volume Early Mormon Documents Series]; when it comes to everything else, he is 'meh' at best):

. . . Vogel claims we can ignore the contrary evidence in 3 Nephi because those who adopted modalism in Christian history were certainly aware of similar passages in the gospel of John which were difficult to account for in their view, but that never stopped them from adopting modalism. That may be true but this argument simply begs the question. One could as easily argue that tri-theists were never convinced by statements of God's oneness, so the Book of Mormon is tri-theistic. This argument has the same logical structure as saying that we can ignore pictures from NASA taken by orbiting spacecraft as evidence that the earth is a sphere because members of the Flat Earth Society have seen those same pictures and they weren't convinced. Modalists never cited the Johannine passages to support their modalism. However, the Book of Mormon does express the relation between the Father and the Son in terms similar to the gospel of John which cannot be squared with modalism. The far better view, in my opinion, is a view which accounts for all of the evidence, not just the evidence that supports ones revisionary theory.