Trinity Book Fest – Part 2: The Holy Trinity Revisited

Thomas A. Noble & Jason S. Sexton (editors)

The Holy Trinity Revisited: Essays in Response to Stephen R. Holmes
Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2014.
Available at Amazon.com

Stephen Holmes’ book The Holy Trinity (UK edition) or The Quest for the Trinity (US edition) is a great volume that sets out the doctrine of the Trinity, its origins and meaning, as well as engaging with currents in Trinitarian theology. Still, it gave give grist for the mill of many scholars. Holmes questioned exactly “how” the Trinity is biblical, he was critical of much of patristic exegesis which operated in hermeneutical paradigms that few of us would find convincing today, he denied the Regnon thesis of a big divide between eastern and western expressions views of the Trinity, and he offered a rather stinging critique of social trinitarianism. Fred Sanders describes Holmes’s book as “the feistiest of this kind of new wave of counter-revolutionary Trinitaranism.” This volume is a book length response to Holmes by a number of contributors (Fred Sanders, Robert Lethan, Kevin Giles, Jon Mackenzie, Jason Radcliff, R.T. Mullins, John Colwell, Michael Bird, and Graham Watts), who question his reading of the exegesis of the church fathers and particularly his reading of Augustine as well as facets of the social trinitarianism which Holmes rejects. An excellent engagement with an excellent initial volume.