God in Patristic Thought

by G.L. Prestige

This book assembles the evidence for what the Greek Fathers, the men whose contructive thought underlies the creeds, really thought and taught about the nature of God. It shows that they were original thinkers, with a profound reverence for the text of the Scriptures, and minds keenly tranined to discuss what ultimate truths were expressed in the scriptural text and what reality should be ascribed to Christian religious experience. The results indicate that a good deal which is assumed in current theological text-books needs to be revised. The Fathers had to reconcile monotheism with faith in a Trinity of divine Persons. In the process, they pursued many lines of inquiry, often only to discard them after trial, but after following various clues and making various intellectual adventures they reached a solution of the problem, which was both true to their data and philosophically reasonable. Though the bulk of the book is concerned with the third and fourth centuries, during which the creeds were in the process of formulation, the story is carried down to the eighth century where the progress of original thought came to a standstill. It is shown that a great change came over the philosophical tradition during the sixth century, and owing to the consequent growth of formalism, a genuine outbreak of tritheism occurred. The book ends with the account of how this outbreak was met and overcome, largely through the efforts of a thinker whose very name is unknown, and whose book has only survived under the name of another man.

Genres: Theology

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2008

Reviews

[Lee Irons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. I learned so much from it. It is truly a rich and rewarding study. The title of the book is a little misleading. Although he does cover the general doctrine of God in the church fathers in the first three chapters, the remaining 11 chapters are devoted to the doctrine of the Trinity. So it would better be titled “The Trinity in Patristic Thought.” I think the main benefit of this book is the way Prestige really tries to get inside the minds of the church fathers via word studies replete with quotations showing how they used each term.

In his introduction he explains how the book originated. “At the end of 1921 I was invited by the late Professor C. H. Turner to undertake research work for the projected Lexicon of Patristic Greek* ... It fell to me to investigate ... nearly all the words of main importance for the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation ... The basis, therefore, of the present book is the extended research made for the Lexicon into the meanings ... of those words which acquired special importance for Greek patristic thought.”

(*This is the famous A Patristic Greek Lexicon. It passed through various editors and was ultimately published by Oxford under the editorship of G. W. H. Lampe in 1961. Prestige’s early work is acknowledged in note 1 of the Preface.)

Prestige covers such crucial Greek theological terms as: gen(n)etos, agen(n)etos, prosopon, hypostasis, ousia, homoousios, monarchia, oikonomia, perichoresis, and so on. The book is not just a series of word studies. Prestige also covers the history of the debates and the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, but in this historical dimension, Prestige is old and needs to be supplemented with more recent works like that of R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God or, more recently, Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea and, above all, Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy.