Retrieving Nicaea Quotes

“The term “unbegotten” (agen[n]ētos) was to carry much of the weight of this newfound clarity on the radical difference between God and the world. This development constituted an agitation or break within the flow of Christian experience inasmuch as it needed to be creatively integrated with another fundamental principle of Christian experience, the primacy of Jesus as Lord. According to everyone’s understanding of Scripture, even the preexistent Christ was begotten, caused by the Father. Moreover, although Creator, he was also closely associated with creation, as its paradigm, “the beginning of God’s works” (Prov. 8:22; cf. Col. 1:17). In a fairly standard interpretation of the latter scriptural phrase, Origen explains that “in this very subsistence of wisdom there was implicit every capacity and form of the creation that was to be.”[95] How then to reconcile the primacy of Christ, closely bound with his double relation to both God and creation, with this newly maximized sense of divine primacy—the radical difference between God and world and God’s absolute priority and freedom from any kind of posteriority (or being caused)? In the tensions evoked by these questions, a reexamination and reintegration of the elements of Christian experience was being called forth.”
― Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine

“Although we cannot encompass God’s trinitarian being within our human knowledge, we can know and glorify God as Trinity and be consciously and thankfully incorporated into trinitarian life. Thus appropriating the meaning of trinitarian doctrine involves learning to think, live, and pray so as to refer to God’s being as Trinity while at the same time learning to disavow a comprehensive epistemic hold on the God to whom we thus refer ourselves.”
― Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine

“Surely Rahner is right: the meaning of trinitarian doctrine must have a more intrinsic connection to the structure and texture of the whole of Christian life and faith.”
― Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine

“When the meaning of trinitarian doctrine is located principally in some particular creaturely analogue, it becomes separable from other aspects of the Christian mystery. Instead of trinitarian meaning being embedded in the whole nexus of Christian faith, it tends to be reduced to the features of the analogue itself.”
― Khaled Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine