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The Doctrine of God: A Historical Survey
The key to the doctrine of the Trinity is the combination of transcendence and personality in the biblical portrayal of God. This idea is traced through Old Testament, New Testament, the Church Fathers, medieval scholasticism, the Reformation and early modern theology, and three 20th century theologians (Barth, Pannenberg, and Macquarrie).
- GenresTheology
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
16 people want to read
About the author
Christopher B. Kaiser
7 booksProfessor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan. Doctor of astrophysics.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 18, 2021
Not totally sure how to rate this book — I have such mixed feelings and my brain is still throbbing from reading it. There’s such good info here, but the way it’s constructed/written was so hard for me to understand. I gave it 3 stars because I probably won’t be recommending this book to friends haha. I read it for class and would have to read it 2-3 more times to fully grasp everything it contains.
May 22, 2023
Kaiser roots the Doctrine of God in the narrative of Scripture, then traces prominent ideas through various theologians. He covers a lot of ground in such a short book, which means this is exactly what it is titled. It's a survey. The writing is dry and technical but could be helpful for someone looking for something to read on the DoG. I wouldn't suggest starting with this though.
February 11, 2020
Reading the final paragraphs of Charles Kaiser’s The Doctrine of God: A Historical Survey, I was reminded of one of the last lines from Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, a drama which centers on questions surrounding time and progress. In a closing benediction, the protagonist Prior Walter reaches his hands toward the audience and speaks the line, “The world only spins forward.” In the development of the doctrine of God, I have learned, there is no going backward to a simpler time. Kaiser’s survey of the historical development of the doctrine of God left me feeling first, grateful for the centuries of thought behind the formulations of the doctrine of God, but second, the sense that as fitting as earlier formulations were in their original context, followers of Christ must be always looking to “reformulate, reassess, and rediscover” the doctrine for new situations and new audiences (146).
From the outset, Kaiser significantly narrows the scope of his historical survey: “The purpose of this present study,” Kaiser writes, “is neither to present a systematic theology nor directly to address the challenges of modern life and thought,” but rather “an overall history of the doctrine [of God]” which may be used as a springboard to jump into more specific research (vii). Though definitely not perfect, I think the book accomplishes the purpose for which it was written: it is surprisingly thorough for being so concise, it manages to examine many of the most influential key players in the development of the doctrine and show how they contribute to the larger historical flow of thought, and it provides enough of an introduction to their theology to orient the reader in approaching more of their works in further research.
With that being said, I would only recommend this book to a reader who is familiar with the doctrine of God and much of the related technical language, not to the average reader. It seems Kaiser’s physics and theology background has perhaps made him a bit too comfortable with technical language that is rather difficult to understand. Kaiser also travels through the centuries of thought at a breakneck speed, condensing almost two millennia of thought on the doctrine of God into a hundred and fifty-page slim volume. One may question the wisdom of condensing so much history into so few pages, and if it would have been wiser if more room had been allotted to make the content clearer and easier to digest. All in all, the average reader will struggle with the pace, density, and technical nature of Kaiser’s writing.
Part of what is difficult about evaluating The Doctrine of God is that Kaiser is mostly reporting the thoughts of other theologians, and sharing few thoughts of his own. It is mostly through several themes which emerge in his survey--transcendence and immanence, intra-personal and inter-personal models for the Trinity, and whether or not real knowledge of God can be derived from the natural world or human reason--that some of his own commitments are revealed. These underlying commitments may be most detectable in the first two chapters, focusing on the Old and New Testaments, which Kaiser begins by noting two “offences to our modernity,” immanence and transcendence, which he weaves throughout the book (2).
Kaiser leaves a lot of ambiguity in his examination of the biblical text, which is helpful; he manages to remain relatively detached in presenting the “raw material” of the doctrine of God in the biblical record. Kaiser highlights specific language for God in the Old Testament which lacks the precision of the later creeds: His Word, and His Spirit (19-21). In the New Testament, the language of the relationship between the Son and the Father is likewise imprecise and rather ambiguous; “[T]he deity of Jesus,” he writes, “important as it may seem to us, was not an issue for early Christians as much as the ‘yahweh-ness’ of Jesus was” (37).
Kaiser also notes that, in the biblical text and the patristic era, the viability of natural theology, or whether or not real knowledge of God is accessible through the natural world and human reason, was very much not assumed: “The possibility that God could be approached purely by reason was not taken seriously by any of the Church fathers” (56). This is a reoccurring theme. For Kaiser, Thomas Aquinas, although he provided the Church with “the first, and perhaps best, Christian synthesis” of responses to the problem of multiple kinds of knowledge, “had to make compromises...that only concealed the underlying problem and delayed its eventual resurfacing” (106). It seems that the question might have been best answered by Luther, who claimed that “the God thus known by natural reason was an unapproachable God of wrath: his righteous judgements could only evoke human hatred and rebellion” (111). Kaiser seems much more comfortable with formulations which exclude reliance upon general revelation almost entirely, and fails to interact at length with biblical texts which seem to indicate that real knowledge of God is accessible through it (for example, Psalm 19:1-3, Romans 1:20, Acts 17:26-28).
Especially enlightening for me was the way Kaiser showed that significant controversy over the doctrine of God has had a clarifying effect in the life of the Church. The Arian controversy, for instance, made the “halfway position” of Tertullian and others, that the generation of the Son was “located...at a point in time just prior to the creation of the world,” impossible to hold: “Either God was eternally Father and eternally Son, or else the Son was a temporal being, the first and greatest of God’s creatures, and God himself was an undifferentiated, indescribable Monad” (60-61). Indeed, Kaiser notes that one of the most significant steps in the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity was the “basically negative definition of the doctrine” put forth by Dionysius of Rome, in which were named the three “heretical alternatives”: tritheism, modalism, and subordinationism (79).
The final chapter on contemporary presentations of the doctrine of God was also helpful; Kaiser showed how the modern formulations of the doctrine of God by Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and John Macquarrie were in fact “very close to the patristic doctrine of God”; Kaiser writes that “the really striking feature of all three theologians of the twentieth century that we have studied is the manner in which they have rediscovered biblical and patristic ideas that have long been neglected in the Western Church. (146)” As Kaiser concluded, I was reminded of how important it is to not only be firmly rooted in the biblical story, but also to be rooted in the story of the development of doctrine in the Church after the biblical record.
Kaiser’s survey has helped me to locate myself within the story of the Church’s development of the doctrine of God. Though it may seem enticing to dream of going back to earlier formulations of the doctrine, especially to the ambiguity and flexibility in the language of the biblical text, we cannot travel backward to a time before all the formulations of the early Church fathers, the medieval scholastics, the Protestant reformers, and the later theologians. The words have already been written and spoken, and now, regardless of how accurate we think they are, we must deal with them, answer them, and even update them for the upcoming generations.
The world only spins forward. The task of theology will, in Kaiser’s words, “continue for as long as humans ask questions about the meaning of life and wonder about the man from Nazareth who spoke about the coming kingdom of God” (146).
From the outset, Kaiser significantly narrows the scope of his historical survey: “The purpose of this present study,” Kaiser writes, “is neither to present a systematic theology nor directly to address the challenges of modern life and thought,” but rather “an overall history of the doctrine [of God]” which may be used as a springboard to jump into more specific research (vii). Though definitely not perfect, I think the book accomplishes the purpose for which it was written: it is surprisingly thorough for being so concise, it manages to examine many of the most influential key players in the development of the doctrine and show how they contribute to the larger historical flow of thought, and it provides enough of an introduction to their theology to orient the reader in approaching more of their works in further research.
With that being said, I would only recommend this book to a reader who is familiar with the doctrine of God and much of the related technical language, not to the average reader. It seems Kaiser’s physics and theology background has perhaps made him a bit too comfortable with technical language that is rather difficult to understand. Kaiser also travels through the centuries of thought at a breakneck speed, condensing almost two millennia of thought on the doctrine of God into a hundred and fifty-page slim volume. One may question the wisdom of condensing so much history into so few pages, and if it would have been wiser if more room had been allotted to make the content clearer and easier to digest. All in all, the average reader will struggle with the pace, density, and technical nature of Kaiser’s writing.
Part of what is difficult about evaluating The Doctrine of God is that Kaiser is mostly reporting the thoughts of other theologians, and sharing few thoughts of his own. It is mostly through several themes which emerge in his survey--transcendence and immanence, intra-personal and inter-personal models for the Trinity, and whether or not real knowledge of God can be derived from the natural world or human reason--that some of his own commitments are revealed. These underlying commitments may be most detectable in the first two chapters, focusing on the Old and New Testaments, which Kaiser begins by noting two “offences to our modernity,” immanence and transcendence, which he weaves throughout the book (2).
Kaiser leaves a lot of ambiguity in his examination of the biblical text, which is helpful; he manages to remain relatively detached in presenting the “raw material” of the doctrine of God in the biblical record. Kaiser highlights specific language for God in the Old Testament which lacks the precision of the later creeds: His Word, and His Spirit (19-21). In the New Testament, the language of the relationship between the Son and the Father is likewise imprecise and rather ambiguous; “[T]he deity of Jesus,” he writes, “important as it may seem to us, was not an issue for early Christians as much as the ‘yahweh-ness’ of Jesus was” (37).
Kaiser also notes that, in the biblical text and the patristic era, the viability of natural theology, or whether or not real knowledge of God is accessible through the natural world and human reason, was very much not assumed: “The possibility that God could be approached purely by reason was not taken seriously by any of the Church fathers” (56). This is a reoccurring theme. For Kaiser, Thomas Aquinas, although he provided the Church with “the first, and perhaps best, Christian synthesis” of responses to the problem of multiple kinds of knowledge, “had to make compromises...that only concealed the underlying problem and delayed its eventual resurfacing” (106). It seems that the question might have been best answered by Luther, who claimed that “the God thus known by natural reason was an unapproachable God of wrath: his righteous judgements could only evoke human hatred and rebellion” (111). Kaiser seems much more comfortable with formulations which exclude reliance upon general revelation almost entirely, and fails to interact at length with biblical texts which seem to indicate that real knowledge of God is accessible through it (for example, Psalm 19:1-3, Romans 1:20, Acts 17:26-28).
Especially enlightening for me was the way Kaiser showed that significant controversy over the doctrine of God has had a clarifying effect in the life of the Church. The Arian controversy, for instance, made the “halfway position” of Tertullian and others, that the generation of the Son was “located...at a point in time just prior to the creation of the world,” impossible to hold: “Either God was eternally Father and eternally Son, or else the Son was a temporal being, the first and greatest of God’s creatures, and God himself was an undifferentiated, indescribable Monad” (60-61). Indeed, Kaiser notes that one of the most significant steps in the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity was the “basically negative definition of the doctrine” put forth by Dionysius of Rome, in which were named the three “heretical alternatives”: tritheism, modalism, and subordinationism (79).
The final chapter on contemporary presentations of the doctrine of God was also helpful; Kaiser showed how the modern formulations of the doctrine of God by Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and John Macquarrie were in fact “very close to the patristic doctrine of God”; Kaiser writes that “the really striking feature of all three theologians of the twentieth century that we have studied is the manner in which they have rediscovered biblical and patristic ideas that have long been neglected in the Western Church. (146)” As Kaiser concluded, I was reminded of how important it is to not only be firmly rooted in the biblical story, but also to be rooted in the story of the development of doctrine in the Church after the biblical record.
Kaiser’s survey has helped me to locate myself within the story of the Church’s development of the doctrine of God. Though it may seem enticing to dream of going back to earlier formulations of the doctrine, especially to the ambiguity and flexibility in the language of the biblical text, we cannot travel backward to a time before all the formulations of the early Church fathers, the medieval scholastics, the Protestant reformers, and the later theologians. The words have already been written and spoken, and now, regardless of how accurate we think they are, we must deal with them, answer them, and even update them for the upcoming generations.
The world only spins forward. The task of theology will, in Kaiser’s words, “continue for as long as humans ask questions about the meaning of life and wonder about the man from Nazareth who spoke about the coming kingdom of God” (146).
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October 8, 2022As God continues to build a people throughout history, how does their view of him change and shift as the world around them changes and shifts? Given that the Old Testament covers about a thousand years of history but the New Testament only records about 60-70 years, in the year 2022 the church has the opportunity to look back and see how our own theology of God has developed in the post-Scriptural period. Christopher B. Kaiser’s book The Doctrine of God is an attempt at this, with commentary and contextualization for how different theologians throughout Christian history have explained what kind of God we worship.
Kaiser, writing in the late twentieth century, begins with how the Old Testament portrays Yahweh, then proceeds to how those themes develop in the New Testament, especially around the beginnings of understanding around the doctrine of the Trinity. In the Bible, we see God as a person, both transcendent and immanent, who acts in history, making covenants with people and working on behalf of the poor, marginalized, and other people in need. This work is all fulfilled in the person of Jesus who continues his work in the church by the Holy Spirit; while there is distinction made between the Father, Son, and Spirit, there is also unity involved.
Later generations will take that up and eventually work out trinitarian theology–one God, three persons–over and against other attempts at explanation. Kaiser does take pains to explain that while the doctrine of the Trinity isn’t formalized until later in church history, the roots of the idea are biblical; he also makes sure to correlate each person of the Trinity with the Old Testament portrayal of Yahweh.
The rest of the book explains how the doctrine of God develops throughout history, starting with the church fathers and the early church councils and ending with three contemporary theologians. I found it helpful that he took time to situate each scholar he discusses not just in their theological context, but in their social and historical contexts as well. For example, Karl Barth’s writing is a response to what’s going on in mid-century Germany, with the rise of the Third Reich and the mainstream German church’s capitulation to it; the patristic writers live in a world that values reason and abstract thought and so shift the focus from God-as-person to God-as-Being. Having that context helps with understanding of why and how ideas are formulated and expressed as they are, even where one would disagree with the ideas themselves. It’s a helpful corrective for our own biases as twenty-first century readers–how do our own socio-political situations shape how we express historical orthodox doctrine?
Kaiser also doesn’t just give the reader a strict overview of theological development; as a theologian himself he writes in dialogue with previous thinkers as opposed to just describing their own arguments. He responds to them, especially as he disagrees and finds flaws in their logic, and inserts his own ideas here and there in the text. He writes, like his subjects, as a product of his own time and place. He does admit as much in the preface: “The author has convictions that influence his selection and treatment of the material, and these will be readily apparent to the reader” (p. viii).
His responses to his fellow scholars root themselves in his interpretation of the story of Scripture in chapters one and two–an appropriate lens for someone living in the narrative-obsessed postmodern era. Any pushback he provides tends to be against an abstract, transcendent deity as opposed to how he writes about a personal, action-oriented, relational God. As a student in a class on the doctrine of God, I’d say that overall, although maybe not in some specifics, we and Kaiser are moving more or less in the same direction, insofar as we agree that Scripture seems to be more concerned with what God does than what God is.
The book is fairly Western-centric; it might have benefitted from more interaction with both Eastern Orthodox theologians and theologians from what we now call the Global South. After all, the West isn’t the only place where Christians are thinking about the nature and person of God! Kaiser also doesn’t interact much with evangelicalism except to say that they chose “to reassert the old absolutes oriented toward the prehistoric past” which “required a negative stance towards theories of natural evolution and/or historical criticism and, therefore, a degree of isolation from the forefront of modern thought” (pp. 127-8). It’s somewhat dismissive (although not entirely untrue, to be fair), and given that evangelicalism is such a force not only in the West but globally, it could have received some more attention. It might have been helpful for Kaiser to more explicitly situate himself, and his audience, in the context in which we all live and work out our doctrines of God.
This is not a long book, but it is a dense book, and Kaiser also assumes some background knowledge of theology and philosophy (e.g., he cites figures like Heidegger, Kant, and Coleridge, philosophers most laypeople aren’t familiar with except in passing). I wouldn’t recommend it to a brand new Christian, or someone who wants a basic overview of the doctrine of God, but for students in more formalized theological education, it’s a decent starting point for further study, with a solid annotated bibliography provided in the back (not to mention all the primary texts that are cited and analyzed).
An overview of the doctrine of God ought to lead not only to further study and intellectual knowledge, but to an appreciation for how God’s people have sought to understand and know him throughout history. This should in turn lead us to examine our own beliefs and practices in light of our place in history and how everyone before us has contributed to shaping them. Overall, though it has some flaws, The Doctrine of God accomplished that goal for me, and has been good preparation for more study and meditation on these ideas.
Kaiser, writing in the late twentieth century, begins with how the Old Testament portrays Yahweh, then proceeds to how those themes develop in the New Testament, especially around the beginnings of understanding around the doctrine of the Trinity. In the Bible, we see God as a person, both transcendent and immanent, who acts in history, making covenants with people and working on behalf of the poor, marginalized, and other people in need. This work is all fulfilled in the person of Jesus who continues his work in the church by the Holy Spirit; while there is distinction made between the Father, Son, and Spirit, there is also unity involved.
Later generations will take that up and eventually work out trinitarian theology–one God, three persons–over and against other attempts at explanation. Kaiser does take pains to explain that while the doctrine of the Trinity isn’t formalized until later in church history, the roots of the idea are biblical; he also makes sure to correlate each person of the Trinity with the Old Testament portrayal of Yahweh.
The rest of the book explains how the doctrine of God develops throughout history, starting with the church fathers and the early church councils and ending with three contemporary theologians. I found it helpful that he took time to situate each scholar he discusses not just in their theological context, but in their social and historical contexts as well. For example, Karl Barth’s writing is a response to what’s going on in mid-century Germany, with the rise of the Third Reich and the mainstream German church’s capitulation to it; the patristic writers live in a world that values reason and abstract thought and so shift the focus from God-as-person to God-as-Being. Having that context helps with understanding of why and how ideas are formulated and expressed as they are, even where one would disagree with the ideas themselves. It’s a helpful corrective for our own biases as twenty-first century readers–how do our own socio-political situations shape how we express historical orthodox doctrine?
Kaiser also doesn’t just give the reader a strict overview of theological development; as a theologian himself he writes in dialogue with previous thinkers as opposed to just describing their own arguments. He responds to them, especially as he disagrees and finds flaws in their logic, and inserts his own ideas here and there in the text. He writes, like his subjects, as a product of his own time and place. He does admit as much in the preface: “The author has convictions that influence his selection and treatment of the material, and these will be readily apparent to the reader” (p. viii).
His responses to his fellow scholars root themselves in his interpretation of the story of Scripture in chapters one and two–an appropriate lens for someone living in the narrative-obsessed postmodern era. Any pushback he provides tends to be against an abstract, transcendent deity as opposed to how he writes about a personal, action-oriented, relational God. As a student in a class on the doctrine of God, I’d say that overall, although maybe not in some specifics, we and Kaiser are moving more or less in the same direction, insofar as we agree that Scripture seems to be more concerned with what God does than what God is.
The book is fairly Western-centric; it might have benefitted from more interaction with both Eastern Orthodox theologians and theologians from what we now call the Global South. After all, the West isn’t the only place where Christians are thinking about the nature and person of God! Kaiser also doesn’t interact much with evangelicalism except to say that they chose “to reassert the old absolutes oriented toward the prehistoric past” which “required a negative stance towards theories of natural evolution and/or historical criticism and, therefore, a degree of isolation from the forefront of modern thought” (pp. 127-8). It’s somewhat dismissive (although not entirely untrue, to be fair), and given that evangelicalism is such a force not only in the West but globally, it could have received some more attention. It might have been helpful for Kaiser to more explicitly situate himself, and his audience, in the context in which we all live and work out our doctrines of God.
This is not a long book, but it is a dense book, and Kaiser also assumes some background knowledge of theology and philosophy (e.g., he cites figures like Heidegger, Kant, and Coleridge, philosophers most laypeople aren’t familiar with except in passing). I wouldn’t recommend it to a brand new Christian, or someone who wants a basic overview of the doctrine of God, but for students in more formalized theological education, it’s a decent starting point for further study, with a solid annotated bibliography provided in the back (not to mention all the primary texts that are cited and analyzed).
An overview of the doctrine of God ought to lead not only to further study and intellectual knowledge, but to an appreciation for how God’s people have sought to understand and know him throughout history. This should in turn lead us to examine our own beliefs and practices in light of our place in history and how everyone before us has contributed to shaping them. Overall, though it has some flaws, The Doctrine of God accomplished that goal for me, and has been good preparation for more study and meditation on these ideas.
May 24, 2019
Kaiser starts this historical survey by showing how the doctrine of God ought to be tied to the biblical storyline. He then moves through church history examining how the different periods of thought wrestled with the transcendence and Immanence of God.
Really dry and technical. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are already familiar with the Doctrine of God.
Really dry and technical. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are already familiar with the Doctrine of God.
February 11, 2019
A brief historical survey on the doctrine of God. As a history buff, I found this book to be extremely dry. It's not really a book at all, but rather an extended research paper. Kaiser's main points of emphasis are 1) formulation of Trinitarian theology 2) How the patristics understood God's immanence and Transcendence and 3) how the church has wrestled with these concepts over time.
February 5, 2023
This book has a ton of good content regarding the doctrine of God from thinkers spanning the course of human history. However, Kaiser's writing style is quite dry and difficult to comprehend at times. I would not recommend this to someone unless they already have a strong grounding in the subject.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews