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Novatian (c. 210–280) was a highly educated priest, theologian, and writer. His work, On the Trinity, advances beyond the Trinitarian theology of Tertullian’s earlier thought in maintaining the eternal Sonship of Christ. Novatian initiated conceptualizing the metaphysics of the Incarnation, through the doctrine of Trinitarian circumincession, which in later theology came to be referred to as the ‘hypostatic union’ of the natures in the person of Christ and the ‘communication of idioms’ between the natures. The aim of this article is to explore some areas of Novatian’s thought on the essence and attributes of God, his deployment of divine ( apophatic ) grammar, his understanding of the use anthropomorphic language in Scripture, the normative assumption of the simplicity of God in his theology (anachronistically speaking), his response to some objections to the hypostatic union, and a few elegantly written reflections on the Spirit.   Novatian divides his tr...

Contemplating God with the Great Tradition ~ Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism by Craig A. Carter Contemplating God was supposed to be Carter’s initial book (not this exact form) many years ago, when he identified as a relational theist, with a pacifist leaning. His research for the book led him down an obscure path to theological liberalism—but he made a U-turn. His doubts led him to look to the theologians of the Nicene culture, a tradition of theology in which he assumed his views of God were rooted. But when he heavily engaged in reading the early church fathers, medievals, and the Reformers, he observed the radical disparity in hermeneutics between the classical tradition of Nicene orthodoxy and that which emerged in the age of the Enlightenment, notably in the writings of Spinoza and Schleiermacher, along with the metaphysics of Kant, Hume, and Hegel—thus the “culture” of Modern Protestantism. His personal ad fontes led him to the classical God that Modern theology esche...