Posts by Fred Sanders

I just picked up the first-ever English translation of Bernardinus de Moor’s eighteenth-century work on the Trinity. Running 382 pages and costing $50 hardcover, it’s a good book and I’m…

“What was actually said by this formula from Chalcedon?” Dietrich Bonhoeffer put this rhetorical question to his students in Berlin in 1933.1 Then, of course, he went on to answer…

In his book Trinity in Aquinas (Sapientia Press, 2003), Gilles Emery OP has a deft explanation of how “relation” works in Thomas’ account of the Trinity in the Summa Theologiae.…

When did the word “role” come to seem like an obvious word to use to describe how the three persons of the Trinity are distinct from each other? I hear…

The Son of God, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, took human nature to himself, died, and rose again. Who is the person who did all this, this person we…

The Son of God is homoousios, consubstantial, with the Father. This consubstantiality means that there is one divine nature, and that Father and Son are persons who both have that…

This is a little exercise I wrote as part of a paper on Protestant Trinitarianism at the 2017 Tyndale Conference in Cambridge. The paper didn’t end up resulting in anything…

Very early in John of Damascus’ On the Orthodox Faith, he says this about God: We also know and confess that God is one, that is to say, one substance,…

“The Word became flesh,” and “he became a curse for us.” These two claims, from John 1:14 and Galatians 3:13 respectively, use the same verb (became) to explain how Jesus…

[The first two paragraphs are background; readers conversant in modern trinitarianism can skip to the third paragraph for the relatively new analysis.] Under conditions of modernity, a certain way of…

There’s an important move Augustine makes at several points in his Trinitarian theology, especially when he’s giving himself space to be discursive and let the big ideas unfold on their…

This is actual reader mail from 2021. I’m pulling it out of the drafts folder and posting it because (a) there’s been some online chatter lately that suggests some readers…

If you’re in the business of rejecting every Trinitarian analogy you’ve ever heard (and I do recommend getting into that business), you might get a reputation for being anti-analogy altogether.…

Websites that talk about how Plato teaches that there’s the form of chair, Chair Itself, chairness: A billion. Places I found the word “chair” in a CTRL+F search of the…

“Perfect in power, love, and purity.” This line from the hymn Holy, Holy, Holy is a great example of the theological move called trinitarian appropriation. Trinitarian appropriation is when you…

Gregory of Nyssa, in his work Refutation of Eunomius’ Confession,1 has a powerful set of arguments for the deity of the Holy Spirit. Most of them involve gathering and linking…

Here’s a diagram I sometimes use when teaching Plato’s Symposium. Using the whiteboard, I only capture the elements that class participants notice. If nobody has noticed anything by the time…

You have three choices if you want to read Augustine’s De Trinitate in English: Haddan, McKenna, or Hill. I’m not aware of any full English translations of Augustine’s De Trinitate…