Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 181:723 (Jul 2024)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 181:723 (July-September 2024) p. 371

Book Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

On Classical Trinitarianism: Retrieving the Nicene Doctrine of the Triune God. Edited by Matthew Barrett. IVP Academic, 2024. xxxiv + 798 pp. $70.00.

Barrett, professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, has edited a collection of forty chapters written by a distinguished group of evangelical theologians, historians, and biblical scholars. The authors agree that proper theology must be rooted in Nicaea and should lead to the worship of the God who is eternally triune. The book includes a foreword by J. Todd Billings, who writes, “Books like this are needed because the landscape of theological discourse about Nicene trinitarian theology has become confused and disoriented” (ix).

Each chapter explains the importance of the primary relational distinction of the eternally unbegotten Father, the begotten Son, and the spiration/procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son. While God is incomprehensible, Ronni Kurtz argues that the divine is actually knowable and that knowability must avoid “the double pitfall of either theological idolatry or theological despair” (207).

The work is divided into three parts. In part 1, “Retrieving Nicene Trinitarianism,” the authors trace how we see, think, and speak of the unity, order, and relational derivation of our triune God. Donald Fairbairn argues, “The church’s trinitarian confession emerged as a result of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the presence of the Spirit, who enabled Christians to affirm that Jesus is Lord” (19). According to Christopher A. Hall, “There is order within the Trinity, and relational derivation. Order and derivation do not imply, however, subordination; simplicity precludes this conclusion” (37).

In part 2, “Trinitarian Hermeneutics and Nicene Dogmatics,” the authors provide a scripturally and traditionally accurate basis from which to describe our incomprehensible yet knowable God. Our language must be careful to affirm, Charles Lee Irons writes, that “whatever is eternally begotten of God shares the same divine nature with the Begetter” (409). In the history of the doctrine, controversies and the questioning of orthodoxy aided in clarifying the concept of the Trinity. For example, Fred Sanders observes that questioning the eternal Sonship clarified the importance of eternal generation as a “precise and special kind of Sonship” (427). As a result, one is able to distinguish the other biblical sonships and the contrasting origins of each. The present distancing from Nicaean theology allows extremes of ei...