Posts by Fred Sanders

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…

There’s a crucial text from Gregory of Nazianzus on the unity of the Trinity, found early in his third theological oration (Oration 29, section 2). Coming to terms with this…

The Moyer Lectures were a series of eighteenth-century London lectures on the doctrine of the Trinity. The lectures were endowed by Lady Rebecca Moyer (d. 1727, widow of Sir Samuel…

There are a few things wrong in this, but try to catch the main point: The widespread desire for an independent doctrine of the Holy Spirit can be satisfied on…

The Nicene Creed (381) calls the Son “begotten from the Father” and also “same-in-substance with the Father.” These two phrases can be treated as two claims that are distinct from…

One of the objections we sometimes hear to the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son is that it seems like a story. To say that God the Father…

Thomas Manton (1620–1677) had a lot to say about human blessedness. His megamassive three-volume commentary on Psalm 119 takes its keynote from that opening beatitude, “Blessed are the undefiled in…

Erasmus’ first best-seller was his Enchiridion, or Handbook of the Christian Soldier. He wrote it in 1501 and published it in 1503, safely before the Reformation began rumbling. It was…

Athanasius’ In Illud Omnia is fantastic. Too bad it got stuck w/no context & a non-title. Personally, I refer to it as “What the Son Has from the Father.” Here’s…

To what shall we compare God? This is a question about analogies. And we shouldn’t treat God as an inert entity about which we can only know by way of…

I was invited to give the charge to the graduates at the 56th annual commencement service for the Los Angeles Bible Training School. Here’s the main point I made. It’s…

Gregory of Nazianzus has a very special way of using the phrase, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” in his Five Theological Orations. The phrase is of course…

In Leo the Great’s first Pentecost sermon from the year 444 (Sermon 75), he graphically narrates the details of the advent of the Holy Spirit: wind, flame, foreign speech, and…

I can easily sing “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us” w/a clear theological conscience. Always have. What do I do when I get to the line, “the Father turns…

I recently led a discussion on Jürgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Here are some notes I took…

A Biblical Path to the Triune God (CUA Press, 2022): Denis Farkasfalvy (Hungarian-born Cistercian who taught in Texas) finished this 100-pager just before dying in May 2020 (at age 83,…