Retrieving Nicaea

Khaled Anatolios on early Trinitarian Doctrine

This review of Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine was first published in International Journal of Systematic Theology in 2014.

For anyone with interest in early Trinitarian theology, it is a good time to be alive. Spurred by indictments of “classical theism” and by more moderate questioning of traditional Trinitarian theology, historical theologians have gone back to take another, intense look at the evidence. In the past decade alone, Anglo-American theology has been treated to Michel Rene Barnes’s Power of God: Dynamis in Gregory of Nyssa (2001), Lewis Ayres’ Nicaea and Its Legacy (2006) and Augustine and the Trinity (2010), and Anatolios’s own Athanasius: The Coherence of his Thought (2004), and to these monographs we might add the outstanding popular and practically-focused study by Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity (2009).

From these and many other studies, it is clear that most of the charges against patristic Trinitarianism must be dismissed: It did not capitulate to Hellenism, did not abandon Scriptural sources or ignore redemptive history, did not float free into arid speculations, did not neutralize the good news of the Suffering Son. As C. S. Lewis could have told us, these old books have proven their ability to liberate us from our parochialisms and to provide fresh insight into the theological challenges of our time.

In scope, Retrieving Nicaea is closer to John Behr’s synthetic two-volume study of Nicene faith (2001, 2004) than to any of the monographs mentioned above. After two chapters summarizing and analyzing the history of fourth-century Trinitarian development, he provides detailed explorations of Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and (more briefly) Augustine. Anatolios offers his own own careful reading of the texts against the background of both recent patristic research and contemporary dogmatic treatments of the Trinity. He is a reliable and perceptive guide, supremely well-informed but not showy in patristics and theology, frequently a profound theologian.

Anatolios’ contributions are methodological and substantive. Methodologically, he argues that tracing the historical development of Trinitarian theology is essential to a grasp of its meaning and intelligibility. “Retrieving Nicaea” does not consist in repeating patristic slogans. Anatolios downplays the role of formulae to argue that “we must creatively re-perform” patristic arguments to appropriate their doctrine in our time, since “the intelligibility of a given doctrine [must be grasped] from within the process of its development” (p. 33).