In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

450 BOOK REVIEWS either of these two masters, it can certainly be argued that it is Scotus, not Aquinas, who should be awarded the palm, for his radical, refreshing, and brilliantly original argument on the two wills. Moreover, it is an argument that goes farther than that of Aquinas or anyone else in this book in advancing the Scholastics’s common goal of defending the full humanity of Christ. While the space Barnes gives to Scotus reflects his acknowledgment that Scholasticism did not come to a creative dead end after Aquinas, and that the concern of later thinkers was not to dismantle his achievements, it has to be said that Barnes does not give Scotus his due. Nor does he recognize the need to place Scotus’s position on the two wills in the context of his wider theology. These objections aside, this book is a signal scholarly achievement. It is the author’s first book, based on his Notre Dame dissertation. But it is a book which a senior scholar with decades of familiarity with the figures treated would be proud to publish. Its strengths are deeply impressive. The acuteness and perceptiveness of Barnes’s analysis are matched by his unfailing lucidity of exposition and his erudite command of previous scholarship. With this book Barnes takes his place as a rising star among interpreters of medieval Scholastic theology. His arrival in that firmament is as warmly to be welcomed as it is auspicious. MARCIA L. COLISH Yale University New Haven, Connecticut Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine. By KHALED ANATOLIOS. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2011. Pp. xiv + 322. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8010-3132-8. Khaled Anatolios, professor of historical theology at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, has written an excellent study on the greatest of all mysteries, the Holy Trinity. The book is called Retrieving Nicaea, not to signal a narrow focus on the first ecumenical council from the year 325, but to highlight the recovery of the Nicene faith by representative orthodox teachers in the century that followed the council. Guided by Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between primary and secondary reflection, Anatolios seeks to lead his readers in “a reinvolvement of secondary reflection that brought about the formulation of trinitarian doctrine” (35). He thus probes the Christian experience that enabled Christians to articulate the doctrines of who God truly is. Cognizant that the book could have had a much larger scope, Anatolios chose to give detailed studies of three theologians: Athana- BOOK REVIEWS 451 sius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine. The choice reflects not only Anatolios’s own areas of expertise, especially evidenced in his previous magisterial work on Athanasius, but also how these three figures, two from the East and one from the West, can inspire a variety of theologians working today to grasp the key features of the Nicene faith. The book deserves a close reading and a consideration of its significance for our reflection on the Trinity. Anatolios shows that much recent systematic theology has run far from the great representatives of the Nicene faith. He characterizes three leading modern approaches, naming those who have missed the heart of what the first ecumenical council is really about. The first school stems from Friedrich Schleiermacher, and has been adopted by the likes of Piet Schoonenberg, Catherine LaCugna, and Roger Haight. This group concedes Kant’s epistemological objection and says that Trinitarian doctrine says nothing intelligible about the being of God. The second school of thought reacts strongly against the first approach, which is outright incompatible with Nicaea, and maintains that God’s self-communication tells us exactly what God’s being is. Karl Rahner typifies this approach. Following Yves Congar’s critique of Rahner’s Grundaxiom, Anatolios cautions against Rahner’s strict conflation of the economic Trinity with the immanent Trinity, and considers it incompatible with Nicaea: “A strict and unqualified conflation of the economic Trinity with the immanent Trinity would entail that the subordination of the incarnate Son to the Father reflects the same order of subordination in the immanent Trinity” (4). Moreover, beyond criticizing Rahner’s inadequate attention to the discontinuities between the economic...

pdf

Share