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The Nicene Faith
In this sequel to The Way to Nicaea, Fr John Behr turns his attention to the fourth century, the era in which Christian theology was formulated as the Nicene faith, the common heritage of most Christians to this day. Engaging the best of modern scholarship, Behr provides a series of original, comprehensive, and insightful sketches of the theology of the key protagonists of the Nicene faith, presenting a powerful vision of Christian theology, centered upon Christ and his Passion. Part One, True God of True God, opens with a reflection on the nature of Christian theology, challenging common presuppositions, and an analysis and survey of the fourth century controversies, followed by studies of Alexander, Arius, the Council of Nicaea, and, Athanasius. Part Two, One of the Holy Trinity, provides analyses of the work of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, together with their opponents, in particular Eunomius and Apollinarius.
507 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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About the author
John Behr
66 books101 followersFr John Behr is Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen. He previously taught at St Vladimir’s Seminary, where he served as Dean from 2007-17; he is also the Metropolitan Kallistos Chair of Orthodox Theology at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Center for Orthodox Theology.
Fr John hails from England, though his family background is Russian and German – and clerical on both sides. From the Russian side, his great-grandfather was sent to London by Metropolian Evlogy to serve there as a priest in 1926; his father was also a priest, ordained by Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), as are his brother (at St Paul’s Monastery on Mt Athos) and his brother-in-law (Sts Cyril and Methodius, Terryville, CT). His maternal grandparents met at Karl Barth’s graduate seminar in Basel, and served in the Lutheran Church in Germany, where his grandfather was a Lutheran pastor.
After completing his first degree in Philosophy in London in 1987, Fr. John spent a year studying in Greece. He finished an M.Phil. in Eastern Christian Studies at Oxford University, under Bishop Kallistos (Ware), who subsequently supervised his doctoral work, which was examined by Fr. Andrew Louth and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. While working on his doctorate, he was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at St Vladimir’s Seminary in 1993, where he has been a permanent faculty member since 1995, tenured in 2000, and ordained in 2001. Before becoming Dean in 2007, he served as the editor of St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, and he still edits the Popular Patristics Series for SVS Press.
His doctoral work was on issues of asceticism and anthropology, focusing on St Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria, and was published by Oxford University Press (2000). After spending almost a decade in the second century, Fr John began the publication of a series on the Formation of Christian Theology (The Way to Nicaea, SVS Press 2001, and The Nicene Faith, SVS Press 2003). Synthesizing these studies, is the book The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2003). In preparation for further volumes of his Formation series, Fr John edited and translated the fragments of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, setting them in their historical and theological context (OUP 2011). More recently Fr John published a more poetic and meditative work entitled Becoming Human: Theological Anthropology in Word and Image (SVS Press, 2013) and a full study of St Irenaeus: St Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (OUP, 2013). Most recently he has completed a new critical edition and translation of Origen’s On First Principles, together with an extensive introduction, for OUP (2017), and John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (OUP 2019). He is currently working on a new edition and translation of the works of Irenaeus.
His other passion is cycling, especially restoring and riding vintage bicycles including a historic Hetchins and a Dursley Pedersen. The Tour de France dominates the Behr family life during July, dictating the scheduling of important family events. Fr John’s wife, a Tour de France enthusiast and armchair cyclist, teaches English at a nearby college, and their two sons and daughter are being taught to appreciate the finer points of French culture: the great “constructeurs” of the last century, La Grande Boucle, and … cheese.
Fr John hails from England, though his family background is Russian and German – and clerical on both sides. From the Russian side, his great-grandfather was sent to London by Metropolian Evlogy to serve there as a priest in 1926; his father was also a priest, ordained by Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom), as are his brother (at St Paul’s Monastery on Mt Athos) and his brother-in-law (Sts Cyril and Methodius, Terryville, CT). His maternal grandparents met at Karl Barth’s graduate seminar in Basel, and served in the Lutheran Church in Germany, where his grandfather was a Lutheran pastor.
After completing his first degree in Philosophy in London in 1987, Fr. John spent a year studying in Greece. He finished an M.Phil. in Eastern Christian Studies at Oxford University, under Bishop Kallistos (Ware), who subsequently supervised his doctoral work, which was examined by Fr. Andrew Louth and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. While working on his doctorate, he was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at St Vladimir’s Seminary in 1993, where he has been a permanent faculty member since 1995, tenured in 2000, and ordained in 2001. Before becoming Dean in 2007, he served as the editor of St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, and he still edits the Popular Patristics Series for SVS Press.
His doctoral work was on issues of asceticism and anthropology, focusing on St Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria, and was published by Oxford University Press (2000). After spending almost a decade in the second century, Fr John began the publication of a series on the Formation of Christian Theology (The Way to Nicaea, SVS Press 2001, and The Nicene Faith, SVS Press 2003). Synthesizing these studies, is the book The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press, 2003). In preparation for further volumes of his Formation series, Fr John edited and translated the fragments of Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, setting them in their historical and theological context (OUP 2011). More recently Fr John published a more poetic and meditative work entitled Becoming Human: Theological Anthropology in Word and Image (SVS Press, 2013) and a full study of St Irenaeus: St Irenaeus of Lyons: Identifying Christianity (OUP, 2013). Most recently he has completed a new critical edition and translation of Origen’s On First Principles, together with an extensive introduction, for OUP (2017), and John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (OUP 2019). He is currently working on a new edition and translation of the works of Irenaeus.
His other passion is cycling, especially restoring and riding vintage bicycles including a historic Hetchins and a Dursley Pedersen. The Tour de France dominates the Behr family life during July, dictating the scheduling of important family events. Fr John’s wife, a Tour de France enthusiast and armchair cyclist, teaches English at a nearby college, and their two sons and daughter are being taught to appreciate the finer points of French culture: the great “constructeurs” of the last century, La Grande Boucle, and … cheese.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 10, 2021
Behr traces the Nicene faith by examining the role of the great theologians Athanasius, Basil, Gregory or Nysa, and Gregory of Nazianzus. This two volume work articulates how they influenced the orthodox Xhristjan faith that is seen today by working through issues of the Trinity, deity of the Holy Spirit, and how the eternal Logos became flesh. Behr helpfully points out how these men were influenced by those who came before them in varying ways and how their individual upbringings provided philosophical understanding of the world around them. This is a fantastic volume that helps provide rich understanding of the development of theological thought in the church.
June 3, 2025
Brilliant stuff here.
Highlights:
Structure! Behr spends 60-odd pages towards the start of the book to work through the major events between 325 and 382. I found myself returning to this historic survey throughout. A truly helpful organisation, information that I can easily get lost in!
Behr sprinkles in an occasional probing criticism of modern theology. He does this enough to help you remember why reading all this stuff is relevant to the task of the church today, without losing focus on the actual scope of his work.
Finally, the close reading he does of many key texts is thorough and insightful; I particularly enjoyed his slow walk through Gregory of Nazianzus' Five Theological Orations!
Highlights:
Structure! Behr spends 60-odd pages towards the start of the book to work through the major events between 325 and 382. I found myself returning to this historic survey throughout. A truly helpful organisation, information that I can easily get lost in!
Behr sprinkles in an occasional probing criticism of modern theology. He does this enough to help you remember why reading all this stuff is relevant to the task of the church today, without losing focus on the actual scope of his work.
Finally, the close reading he does of many key texts is thorough and insightful; I particularly enjoyed his slow walk through Gregory of Nazianzus' Five Theological Orations!
November 28, 2019
Another outstanding contribution to Christian theological thought by John Behr. Behr makes explicit from the outset the problems of conceiving of Nicene theology as "Trinitarian theology" or the "gradual development of a dogmatic edifice," as well as the problems of caricaturizing Nicene opponents or reducing Nicene theology to shorthand formulae.
Having acknowledged such difficulties, Behr pulls the reader into a rich investigation of the Nicene faith by way of its staunchest defenders: Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa (along with their chief opponents). He shows great facility in the primary sources of all such figures that are available, not dismissing the non-Nicenes out of hand, but investigating their own arguments on their own merits and showing where they fell short of confessing the crucified Jesus as the locus of the revelation of God the Father and bearer of the Spirit (the starting point of Nicene theology).
Behr doesn't present a merely historical account, either. Although he offers a careful investigation of the past, his work by no means remains relegated to "mere history," but provides a touchstone for further theological contemplation (as does Nicene theology itself), both implicitly and explicitly. One only wishes there were further volumes (to investigate, for example, the contributions of Chalcedon and Maximus the Confessor which he mentions in the Epilogue). These books are of supreme value for anyone interested not only in Christian history, but Christian theology in general, as they deal with the first principles of Christianity. As Behr writes: "The way to Nicaea is not plotted retrospectively from Nicaea, as if it were itself the starting point, but with reference to the revelation of God in Christ, the subject of the Christian confession from the beginning; if Nicaea is a definitive moment in Christian identity, it is because it preserves the truth of *the* definitive moment. If we overlook this basic fact, then we risk both misunderstanding the landmarks that we think we already know and, more seriously, substituting other first principles, taking something other than Christ and his Cross as constitutive of the identity of Christianity."
Having acknowledged such difficulties, Behr pulls the reader into a rich investigation of the Nicene faith by way of its staunchest defenders: Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa (along with their chief opponents). He shows great facility in the primary sources of all such figures that are available, not dismissing the non-Nicenes out of hand, but investigating their own arguments on their own merits and showing where they fell short of confessing the crucified Jesus as the locus of the revelation of God the Father and bearer of the Spirit (the starting point of Nicene theology).
Behr doesn't present a merely historical account, either. Although he offers a careful investigation of the past, his work by no means remains relegated to "mere history," but provides a touchstone for further theological contemplation (as does Nicene theology itself), both implicitly and explicitly. One only wishes there were further volumes (to investigate, for example, the contributions of Chalcedon and Maximus the Confessor which he mentions in the Epilogue). These books are of supreme value for anyone interested not only in Christian history, but Christian theology in general, as they deal with the first principles of Christianity. As Behr writes: "The way to Nicaea is not plotted retrospectively from Nicaea, as if it were itself the starting point, but with reference to the revelation of God in Christ, the subject of the Christian confession from the beginning; if Nicaea is a definitive moment in Christian identity, it is because it preserves the truth of *the* definitive moment. If we overlook this basic fact, then we risk both misunderstanding the landmarks that we think we already know and, more seriously, substituting other first principles, taking something other than Christ and his Cross as constitutive of the identity of Christianity."
September 14, 2020
Forty years ago, if I had this book would have easily given it 4 stars, but in my old age, the book is of less value, partly because the historical detail is beyond my current interests. Behr is a brilliant scholar and brings together enomormous knowledge as he sorts through the Christian theological controversies of the 4th Century. Certainly the complexity of the arguments as well as the many sides of the disagreements and the varied facets to the arguments make it hard to keep straight who is on whose side. Behr lays out the many nuanced positions of the various personages who were debating, while making clear the central issue is still understanding God's revelation and how Christ is the fullness of the revelation of God, including (or especially!) the death on the cross. Everyone including the various heresies all were trying to find a language and imagery that would be faithful to the revelation. The book also reveals how human the Church really is for human personalities loomed large in the disagreements as did imperial politics played in all that happened. The only thing that amazes me is despite that they all acknowledge how difficult it was coming up with terminology to apply to understanding God's revelation and they all defend the unknowability of God and the shortcomings of human language, they are each intolerant of the language and efforts of the other parties to come up with a language that could be used for God. They were quite willing to condemn others and cut off communion with them without acknowledge that each was struggling with the same llinguistic problems and limits. They each seem to have made little effort to see the goodness in the efforts of others to prserve unity. It became a power struggle made worse by the fact that the Emperor was seen as having authority to solve theological disagreements.
July 17, 2020
Continuing the project begun in The Way to Nicaea, John Behr’s The Nicene Faith surveys the key figures and works surrounding the council of Nicaea and the consolidation of pro-Nicene theology in the late 4th century. Part 1 sets the stage with a historical overview, a survey of Arius and Alexander of Alexandria, and then a detailed treatment of Athanasius. Part 2 focuses on the latter half of the century, specifically the three Cappadocians, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa. As in The Way to Nicaea, Behr’s grasp of the literature is fantastic; the reader will greatly benefit from broad exposure to recent 20th century and early 21st-century scholarship on the relevant figures. However, as in the first volume, Behr’s tradition predominates in his interpretation of the events of the century.
Summary
As an Orthodox theologian, it is not surprising that Behr sees the epitome of clarity and Nicene orthodoxy in the Cappadocians. Indeed, his focus in all these volumes is Eastern theologians. A reader looking for insights into the development of Nicene Christianity in the Western, Latin speaking world will have to look elsewhere (Hanson and Ayres, for example). The hermeneutical approach he develops in the first volume is maintained here; accordingly, Behr identifies the Father’s spiritual exegesis as continuing in the spirit of the Apostles and the New Testament. Also, his reading of Athanasius emphasises de-historicising aspects of Orthodox and Cappadocian thought. I am naturally suspicious of such an interpretation but am insufficiently familiar with Athanasius’s works to evaluate Behr’s interpretation. (His discussion here is consistent with the Cappadocian epistemology and his own evaluative comments. I do not have sufficient familiarity with Athanasius’s works to know if Athanasius would have adopted this approach. However, he does display the same ontological presuppositions as the Cappadocians, discussed below.) His presentation of Apollinaris is helpful and even-handed. However, I do not think his evaluation of Apollinaris on page 400-401, that Christ ends up as not fully God nor fully man, is justified by what we can identify from the existing fragments: Apollinaris insists that “τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου γεγενησθαι, οὐκ ὀνόματι ἀλλὰ ἀληθεία” ([we confess] that the son of God was born the son of man, not in name only but in truth) and “εἶναι τέλειον … αὐτόν υἱόν ἀνθρώπου” (that he is the perfect son of man) (The Faith in Detail, 27 in Loofs pg. 177). Whatever we may think of his solution, Apollinaris believed that his theology upheld the full humanity of Christ in a way that both overcame our sinful proclivities and allowed Him to be the true saviour of humanity. Behr is correct in observing that Apollinaris does not have the de-historicising soteriological focus on the “Passion” that Behr identifies it in the thought of Athanasius and Nyssa.
Evaluation
Behr follows Rowan Williams in rejecting the modern “immanent” vs “economic” distinction in contemporary Trinitarian theology. Instead, he argues for a division between theology and economy, a distinction parallel to the “partitive exegesis” employed in 4th century Christology (“Partitive exegesis” distinguished between Christ acting according to His deity and acting according to His humanity [e.g. 477]). What Behr and Williams seem to be getting at is that we cannot treat “theology” and “economy” as different degrees of the same phenomenon; Jesus acting in history is not analogous to God’s timeless being. Following Williams, he decries the contemporary and 3rd-century belief in an inter-Trinitarian history—a life of God analogous to God’s life vis-à-vis creation—as a weird mix of mythology and metaphysics. In his essay the Nicene Heritage (cited favourably by Behr), Rowan Williams argues that the enduring contribution of Nicene Christianity is to establish this distinction; what we perceive of God through His revelation is not revelatory of who God is in Himself but gives us confidence that what we see is consistent with who God must be. This understanding of revelation reinforces the apophatic stream of thought, which reaches its Nicene crescendo in the Cappadocians:
[What’s said of God] is not in tension with the apophatic. Properly speaking, it reinforces the apophatic impulse, in confronting us simultaneously with the narrative of Israel, Jesus and the Church, and with an austerely formal structure for referring to the God who gives coherence to the narrative, and of whom nothing can be said substantively but that this God is such as to give coherence to this narrative, that we meet this God thus and are constrained to organise what we say thus. (Rowan Williams, “The Nicene Heritage,” in The Christian Understanding of God Today: Theological Colloquium on the Occasion of the 400th Anniversary of the Foundation of Trinity College, Dublin, ed. James M. Byrne (Dublin: Columba Press, 1993), 47.)
In addition to the problems I identified in the last review, with Behr’s understanding of the function of Scripture within the Bible and the Fathers, I believe this theological emphasis is problematic. As I am currently arguing in my PhD thesis, the view of God developed by apophaticism and the broader epistemology for knowing God presented by Behr and meditated upon by the 4th century Fathers presupposes a view of knowledge that is incompatible with the Bible and has, fortuitously, come under severe attack with the advent of Modernity and Postmodernity. That is, the general assumption of this period is that of Essentialism, that things are fully or truly known through their essence, which is the cause of all universal properties manifest in a thing (i.e. the properties proper to a dog are caused by the dog essence or dogness). The result of such a view is that all non-essential or particularising properties (such as time, place, action, and accidental detail [colour, shape, size]) are not true objects of knowledge. Furthermore, to have true knowledge is also to have exhaustive knowledge, for knowledge of an essence is simple knowledge while exhausting all that is truly knowable about a thing. This view of knowledge rules out what some contemporary philosophers have called “personal knowledge,” the knowledge of acting subjects over against knowledge of inanimate objects. This view of knowledge also leads to the de-historicising of the content of faith, for the particularity of events cannot lead to universal truth (as Lessing put it, the contingent truths of history cannot show us the universal truths of reason). Behr’s volume is replete with these assumptions; this is where his work is at its weakest.
However, for its in-depth survey of the thought and events of the 4th century, this second volume of his series Formation of Christian Theology is an invaluable contribution to Patristic scholarship.
Summary
As an Orthodox theologian, it is not surprising that Behr sees the epitome of clarity and Nicene orthodoxy in the Cappadocians. Indeed, his focus in all these volumes is Eastern theologians. A reader looking for insights into the development of Nicene Christianity in the Western, Latin speaking world will have to look elsewhere (Hanson and Ayres, for example). The hermeneutical approach he develops in the first volume is maintained here; accordingly, Behr identifies the Father’s spiritual exegesis as continuing in the spirit of the Apostles and the New Testament. Also, his reading of Athanasius emphasises de-historicising aspects of Orthodox and Cappadocian thought. I am naturally suspicious of such an interpretation but am insufficiently familiar with Athanasius’s works to evaluate Behr’s interpretation. (His discussion here is consistent with the Cappadocian epistemology and his own evaluative comments. I do not have sufficient familiarity with Athanasius’s works to know if Athanasius would have adopted this approach. However, he does display the same ontological presuppositions as the Cappadocians, discussed below.) His presentation of Apollinaris is helpful and even-handed. However, I do not think his evaluation of Apollinaris on page 400-401, that Christ ends up as not fully God nor fully man, is justified by what we can identify from the existing fragments: Apollinaris insists that “τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ υἱὸν ἀνθρώπου γεγενησθαι, οὐκ ὀνόματι ἀλλὰ ἀληθεία” ([we confess] that the son of God was born the son of man, not in name only but in truth) and “εἶναι τέλειον … αὐτόν υἱόν ἀνθρώπου” (that he is the perfect son of man) (The Faith in Detail, 27 in Loofs pg. 177). Whatever we may think of his solution, Apollinaris believed that his theology upheld the full humanity of Christ in a way that both overcame our sinful proclivities and allowed Him to be the true saviour of humanity. Behr is correct in observing that Apollinaris does not have the de-historicising soteriological focus on the “Passion” that Behr identifies it in the thought of Athanasius and Nyssa.
Evaluation
Behr follows Rowan Williams in rejecting the modern “immanent” vs “economic” distinction in contemporary Trinitarian theology. Instead, he argues for a division between theology and economy, a distinction parallel to the “partitive exegesis” employed in 4th century Christology (“Partitive exegesis” distinguished between Christ acting according to His deity and acting according to His humanity [e.g. 477]). What Behr and Williams seem to be getting at is that we cannot treat “theology” and “economy” as different degrees of the same phenomenon; Jesus acting in history is not analogous to God’s timeless being. Following Williams, he decries the contemporary and 3rd-century belief in an inter-Trinitarian history—a life of God analogous to God’s life vis-à-vis creation—as a weird mix of mythology and metaphysics. In his essay the Nicene Heritage (cited favourably by Behr), Rowan Williams argues that the enduring contribution of Nicene Christianity is to establish this distinction; what we perceive of God through His revelation is not revelatory of who God is in Himself but gives us confidence that what we see is consistent with who God must be. This understanding of revelation reinforces the apophatic stream of thought, which reaches its Nicene crescendo in the Cappadocians:
[What’s said of God] is not in tension with the apophatic. Properly speaking, it reinforces the apophatic impulse, in confronting us simultaneously with the narrative of Israel, Jesus and the Church, and with an austerely formal structure for referring to the God who gives coherence to the narrative, and of whom nothing can be said substantively but that this God is such as to give coherence to this narrative, that we meet this God thus and are constrained to organise what we say thus. (Rowan Williams, “The Nicene Heritage,” in The Christian Understanding of God Today: Theological Colloquium on the Occasion of the 400th Anniversary of the Foundation of Trinity College, Dublin, ed. James M. Byrne (Dublin: Columba Press, 1993), 47.)
In addition to the problems I identified in the last review, with Behr’s understanding of the function of Scripture within the Bible and the Fathers, I believe this theological emphasis is problematic. As I am currently arguing in my PhD thesis, the view of God developed by apophaticism and the broader epistemology for knowing God presented by Behr and meditated upon by the 4th century Fathers presupposes a view of knowledge that is incompatible with the Bible and has, fortuitously, come under severe attack with the advent of Modernity and Postmodernity. That is, the general assumption of this period is that of Essentialism, that things are fully or truly known through their essence, which is the cause of all universal properties manifest in a thing (i.e. the properties proper to a dog are caused by the dog essence or dogness). The result of such a view is that all non-essential or particularising properties (such as time, place, action, and accidental detail [colour, shape, size]) are not true objects of knowledge. Furthermore, to have true knowledge is also to have exhaustive knowledge, for knowledge of an essence is simple knowledge while exhausting all that is truly knowable about a thing. This view of knowledge rules out what some contemporary philosophers have called “personal knowledge,” the knowledge of acting subjects over against knowledge of inanimate objects. This view of knowledge also leads to the de-historicising of the content of faith, for the particularity of events cannot lead to universal truth (as Lessing put it, the contingent truths of history cannot show us the universal truths of reason). Behr’s volume is replete with these assumptions; this is where his work is at its weakest.
However, for its in-depth survey of the thought and events of the 4th century, this second volume of his series Formation of Christian Theology is an invaluable contribution to Patristic scholarship.
August 26, 2025
This took me forever to get through but so worth it. In a lot of ultra-low church / evangelical / Pentecostal circles, Nicaea and the Fathers in general get a bit of suspicion thrown in their direction. "The language of the creed isn't Biblical." "The church was corrupted with Greek philosophy and removed from its origins."
Behr deftly destroys such claims by demonstrating that the fundamental task of early Christian theology was about describing the identity of the Christ revealed in Scripture, which all bears witness to him. Behr shows how the work of theology was fundamentally exegetical, and it was in fact largely the heretics, not the orthodox believers, who approached the question of Christ from philosophical rather than biblical grounds.
Behr also emphasizes the centrality of the Passion to understanding the identity of Christ and the way in which the full Bible bears witness to Christ. He shows how these themes remained at the core of all early Christian theology.
I would love to see a version of these arguments made more accessible to laypeople as I fear this was a really daunting and dense read, as much as I personally enjoyed it.
Behr deftly destroys such claims by demonstrating that the fundamental task of early Christian theology was about describing the identity of the Christ revealed in Scripture, which all bears witness to him. Behr shows how the work of theology was fundamentally exegetical, and it was in fact largely the heretics, not the orthodox believers, who approached the question of Christ from philosophical rather than biblical grounds.
Behr also emphasizes the centrality of the Passion to understanding the identity of Christ and the way in which the full Bible bears witness to Christ. He shows how these themes remained at the core of all early Christian theology.
I would love to see a version of these arguments made more accessible to laypeople as I fear this was a really daunting and dense read, as much as I personally enjoyed it.
December 12, 2020
Brilliant analysis of the theological debates throughout the 300s.
Part 1 includes a long chapter with TONS of names. From that there is analysis of Arius. One big point Behr makes is that not all who were opposed to Nicaea were “Arians” and there was much more complexity among both the heretics. Another big point that Behr makes is that some of our modern ways of approaching this history is misguided. For example, Athanasius and the Cappadocians were not merely philosophizing about the inner life of the Trinity, somehow apart from God’s actions in the world. Instead, they were reasoning from the scripture and the work of God in Jesus. They were not separating “Christology” from “Soteriology”.
The best of this book is when Behr gets to covering the specific works and thought of Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nysa. These four were giants and Behr’s analysis and summaries of their theology is brilliant.
Part 1 includes a long chapter with TONS of names. From that there is analysis of Arius. One big point Behr makes is that not all who were opposed to Nicaea were “Arians” and there was much more complexity among both the heretics. Another big point that Behr makes is that some of our modern ways of approaching this history is misguided. For example, Athanasius and the Cappadocians were not merely philosophizing about the inner life of the Trinity, somehow apart from God’s actions in the world. Instead, they were reasoning from the scripture and the work of God in Jesus. They were not separating “Christology” from “Soteriology”.
The best of this book is when Behr gets to covering the specific works and thought of Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nysa. These four were giants and Behr’s analysis and summaries of their theology is brilliant.
June 30, 2025
**This is a review of both volumes - I highly, highly recommend reading both together.**
This is masterful work on the patristics. Honestly, some of (if not THE) best material I've read on the 4th century in particular. The historical overview chapter, covering the events and councils throughout the 4th century, is alone worth the price of both volumes. It's spectacularly good, and helpful for nuancing the reader's understanding of how Nicene theology developed.
After the historical summary work, Behr focuses on key figures like Athanasius and the Gregorys, and his work is extremely well-researched, carefully attenuated to the historical context, and remarkably aware of the pitfalls of modern interpretation. The impact of reading this work is paradigm-shifting, and bears immense fruit in the understanding of how Christian Theology developed in time.
I cannot recommend this highly enough, for anyone with interest in church history and historical theology.
This is masterful work on the patristics. Honestly, some of (if not THE) best material I've read on the 4th century in particular. The historical overview chapter, covering the events and councils throughout the 4th century, is alone worth the price of both volumes. It's spectacularly good, and helpful for nuancing the reader's understanding of how Nicene theology developed.
After the historical summary work, Behr focuses on key figures like Athanasius and the Gregorys, and his work is extremely well-researched, carefully attenuated to the historical context, and remarkably aware of the pitfalls of modern interpretation. The impact of reading this work is paradigm-shifting, and bears immense fruit in the understanding of how Christian Theology developed in time.
I cannot recommend this highly enough, for anyone with interest in church history and historical theology.
March 27, 2025
The book is a thorough and—I think—pretty insightful look into the 4th Century debates. For a layperson, it may be over-thorough. At some point, I began to question whether it would be more efficient to simply read On the Incarnation than Behr’s lengthy analysis of it.
It’s probably more interesting to scholars than students. A recurring theme in the footnotes, for example, is the debate about dating various letters, which cannot be compelling to anyone other than a specialist.
It’s probably more interesting to scholars than students. A recurring theme in the footnotes, for example, is the debate about dating various letters, which cannot be compelling to anyone other than a specialist.
September 8, 2025
A very recommended book, if a bit dense at times, especially when presenting Athanasius and the Cappadocians' writing.
October 3, 2019
A Thorough walk through Nicene Theology
"Nicene orthodoxy has a greater claim to continuity with earlier Christianity than previously thought; the exegetical practice of the Nicenes does indeed reproduce that of the writers of the New Testament itself: Paul proclaimed that Christ died and rose according to the Scriptures, and the four canonical Gospels expand on this by narrating accounts of Christ in an interpretative engagement with the Scriptures. If this is the case, then serious doubts must be raised regarding claims that orthodoxy was discovered or constructed for the first time in the fourth century."
"Nicene orthodoxy has a greater claim to continuity with earlier Christianity than previously thought; the exegetical practice of the Nicenes does indeed reproduce that of the writers of the New Testament itself: Paul proclaimed that Christ died and rose according to the Scriptures, and the four canonical Gospels expand on this by narrating accounts of Christ in an interpretative engagement with the Scriptures. If this is the case, then serious doubts must be raised regarding claims that orthodoxy was discovered or constructed for the first time in the fourth century."
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews