Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1509290 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 228 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"From early on we are told that the Trinity is a mystery," writes La Due, a London librarian and Catholic commentator. "We were not expected to understand it, but simply to believe it." This volume goes a long way toward helping Christians understand the history of the doctrine of the Trinity. La Due opens with biblical sections that relate how scholars such as Walter Brueggeman, Gerhard von Rad and Karl Rahner have traced the evolution of the Trinity in Scripture. La Due then includes helpful historical chapters that highlight how the idea of the Trinity developed in the writings of church fathers such as Irenaeus, Origen and Athanasius, and was codified as doctrine in councils through the Middle Ages and the Reformation. In an unusual twist, La Due includes a chapter on the trinitarian contributions of the Romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and other 19th-century thinkers, and also brings the discussion up to the present with a chapter on how the Trinity has been discussed by liberation, feminist and process theologians. La Due's historical overview, though brief, is a useful digest of the major voices and movements in trinitarian theology.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Recited by many Christians as merely so many confusing phrases in catechism, the doctrine of the Trinity requires a study such as this to give it meaning for the intellectually rigorous believer. In this singularly wide-ranging and capacious study, La Due surveys the views of the most influential Trinitarian thinkers, from such ancient pioneers as Origen and Irenaeus of Lyons to such modern revisionists as Leonardo Boff and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki. Though principally concerned with how the architects of Christian orthodoxy developed the creeds that united Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, La Due explores a host of the surrounding doctrinal and historical issues. No closed-minded dogmatist, he frankly confronts the gaps and tensions in the early evolution of Trinitarianism. Likewise, he honestly acknowledges profound theological challenges from contemporary philosophies. The vocabulary (e.g., modalism, consubstantiality, co-inherence) will perplex average churchgoers, but this study will draw high praise from serious scholars and theologians. Bryce Christensen
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