God in Patristic Thought

by Leonard Prestige and G.L. Prestige

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0281005109
• ISBN13: 9780281005109
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One of the best overviews

I am so happy to see this book available once more. Prestige is a master of the subject and he writes with a clear style that helps something as technical as Greek philosophy and Christian theology come alive. He assembles the evidence for what the Greek Fathers, the men whose constructive thought underlies the creeds, really thought and taught about the nature of God. It shows that they were original thinkers, with a profound reverence for the text of the Scriptures, and minds keenly trained to discuss what ultimate truths were expressed in the scriptural text and what reality should be ascribed to Christian religious experience. The results indicate that a good deal which is assumed in current theological text-books needs to be revised. The Fathers had to reconcile monotheism with faith in a Trinity of divine Persons. In the process, they pursued many lines of inquiry, often only to discard them after trial, but after following various clues and making various intellectual adventures they reached a solution to the problems, which was both true to their data and philosophically reasonable. Though the bulk of the book is concerned with the third and fourth centuries, during which the creeds were in the process of formulation, the story is carried down to the eighth century. It is shown that a great change came over the philosophical tradition during the sixth century, and owing to the consequent growth of formalism, a genuine outbreak of tritheism occurred. The book ends with the account of how this outbreak was met and overcome, largely through the efforts of a thinker whose very name is unknown, and whose book has only survived under the name of another man. Table of contents: 1. Elements of Theism: A general overview of the terms like impassibility, nature, infinity, form and formless, holiness, indivisibility, etc. 2. Divine Transcendence: Creation, immanence, transcendence, God and the world, etc. 3. Divine Providence: revelation from God, revelation from nature, divine economy, powers and spirits, other `gods' 4. The Holy Triad: Deity of Christ, Deity of Spirit, Wisdom, terms trinity and monarchy 5. Organic Monotheism: Tertullian and Hippolytus 6. The Word: Substitutes for trinitarianism (Seballianism, Unitarianism), Logos as revelation reason and will, `Logos prophoricos' 7. Subordinationalism: Gnostic logos, Origen, Eusebius, `the Second God', Arius 8. I ndividuality and Objectivity: prosopon and persona, hypostasis, etc 9. Object and Substance in God: ousia, hypostasis and persons 10. The Homoousion: terms, Paul of Samosata, in spite of Hilary's misunderstanding, so understood by Arius and the Council of Nicea, a deeper connotation for Athanasius 11. Identity of Substance: Athanasius and the West, Basil, identity, Cappadocian settlement, physis, Latin doctrine's of the Trinity as different from the Greek 12. Unity in the Trinity: models of unity, procession of the Spirit, will and energy, monarchy, persons to essence, etc 13. Triumph