This special issue of Harvard Theological Review is devoted to a critical discussion of fourth-century Christian trinitarian theology, a topic that is now in a significant new phase of scholarly debate amongst both historical and systematic theologians. The papers and conversation published here arose from a day-conference on 5 May 2006 at Harvard Divinity School, when a number of invited scholars and doctoral students from Yale, Chicago, Emory, Fordham, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, and St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, joined the students of the Harvard conference course, “Trinitarianism and Anti-trinitarianism: The Christian God in Dispute” (Spring 2006), for a day of shared papers and public debate. The immediate focus of the event was a roundtable on Lewis Ayres's important new book, Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and that discussion—in extended format—now makes up the first part of this issue. Other papers from students then followed, supplemented by comments from senior members from the floor. In the second part of this issue, two of those original papers, along with two other specially commissioned pieces—on Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine, respectively—extend and refine the debate outlined in the first part. This brief introduction will explain the wider significance of this ongoing debate about patristic trinitarianism, both East and West, and outline what this issue of HTR contributes to it.

A widespread early Christian tradition regarded Solomon as the great exorcist and magician of antiquity, the forerunner of the exorcistic activity of Jesus, and the genius of later Christian magic and divination. In time, this tradition (henceforth the “Solomon magus” tradition) would become increasingly syncretistic and would yield the numerous grimoires and claviculae of the Middle Ages, but in the early centuries of Christianity, the tradition produced texts which were more or less haggadic, that is, engaged in the exegesis of canonical materials and rooted in earlier Jewish interpretive traditions. Modern students of the documents of this tradition have long perceived its debt to the Old Testament, particularly to the portrait of Solomon in 1 Kgs 5:9–14 (4:29–34), a text which both traditional Christian and modern critical interpreters have subsequently explained in nonmagical terms. While Solomon's magical identity is widely recognized to be inspired by the biblical description of his greatness, little is known about how readers in the Solomon magus tradition interpreted the canonical books of traditional Solomonic authorship—the Song of Songs, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Wisdom of Solomon.

Paul was an original thinker, and his epistles are full of novel, at times paradoxical, ideas. Christology stands at the center of Paul's system, and his Christological teaching is unique among Jewish writings of the Second Temple period. Some, especially non-Christological, elements of Pauline theology do, however, have illuminating parallels in earlier Jewish teachings, which seem to have been modified and adapted by Paul to fit his own revolutionary thought. While Paul's theology cannot be reduced to these elements, they might help to explain (at least partly) its emergence. After all, even the ideas of the most original thinkers owe their emergence to prevailing conceptions of the culture in which those thinkers operated, taking some of them for granted and incorporating them naturally into their thought, while struggling with and reacting to others. In Paul's case, Jewish concepts played a significant role in shaping some central features of his theology. Thus, reading Paul in the light of the Dead Sea scrolls and rabbinic writings is important both for understanding Paul as well as for dating and interpreting rabbinic parallels.

Within the precincts of Harvard University, one can still hear an ardent defense of the venerable distinction between “facts” and “values,” or, as sometimes put, between “description” and “evaluation.” Arguments over this distinction go to the heart of the relation of ethics to scholarship, as was vividly illustrated recently by a controversy in this university concerning a doctoral dissertation proposal in “ethnonational studies.” Among other things, the proposal, which envisioned an examination and a critique of ideas of citizenship, as they bear on a contemporary case of ethnonational conflict, was criticized for being more a piece of advocacy, more the subject for an op-ed article, than serious scholarship. The possible consequences were portentous. If the case against the proposal had stood, the candidate would, in effect, have had no right as a scholar to pursue such a line of inquiry in the way proposed.

It is a privilege to have the opportunity for such extended reflection on my book Nicaea and Its Legacy. No doubt some authors feel that their manuscripts are truly finished before they are published: I am one of those who merely abandons a manuscript to the copy editors when other pressures demand an end to hostilities. It should be no surprise, then, that I have always envisaged Nicaea as a snapshot of a moving landscape, not just in the ever-growing body of scholarship on the fourth century, but also in my own thinking. Accordingly I will begin here as I was invited to do in our discussion at Harvard, by offering an account of what I think Nicaea accomplishes and of some areas in which the book needs further work.

Two striking developments in late antiquity are the growing influence of Christianity and the codification of Roman law. The first attempt to harmonize these two developments lies in the late antique Latin work known by scholars as the Lex Dei (“Law of God”) or Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (“Collation of the Laws of Moses and of the Romans”). The anonymous collator of this short legal compendium organized his work following a fairly regular plan, dividing it into sixteen topics (traditionally called titles). Each title begins with a quotation from the Hebrew Bible (in Latin), followed by quotations of passages from Roman jurists and, occasionally, from Roman law. His apparent motive was to demonstrate the similarity between Roman law and the law of God. Scholars have differed over where the collator obtained his Latin translations of passages from the Hebrew Bible. Did he make his own translation from the Greek Septuagint or directly from the Hebrew Scriptures themselves? Did he use the famous Latin translation of Jerome or an older, pre-Jerome, Latin translation of the Bible, known by scholars as the Vetus Latina or Old Latin Bible? Re-examination of the evolution of texts of the Latin Bible and close comparison of biblical passages from the Lex Dei with other surviving Latin versions will confirm that the collator used one of the several versions of the Old Latin Bible that were in circulation in late antiquity. Such a conclusion supports the argument that the religious identity of the collator was Christian (a subject of scholarly controversy for almost a century). Moreover, analysis of the collator's use of the Bible can also shed light on his methodology in compiling his collection.

The goal of New Testament textual criticism would appear to be simple enough: to restore the original text written by each author of the New Testament books. Upon examination, however, the notion of simplicity vanishes immediately and each of the key terms here—“restore,” “original,” “text,” and “author”—has its problematic aspects, but more importantly the simply stated goal itself turns out to be inadequate. Grist for the text-critical mill consists of textual readings or variants, which for the relatively small collection of writings called the New Testament are not merely in the hundreds or thousands, or even the tens of thousands, but run to perhaps a third of a million. They stem from the nearly 5,500 Greek manuscripts, some 10,000 versional manuscripts, and innumerable patristic citations of New Testament passages.

Then thelordsaid to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And thelordput a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. (Gen 4:15)

In his work, Nicaea and Its Legacy, Lewis Ayres raises a number of issues important to the discipline of theology. The first is simply the difficulty of studying the past, especially the fourth century, one of the key periods in the formation of Christian theology. Reading texts from fifteen hundred years ago is sufficiently challenging, but these texts are set in a very complex history (or histories) of theological, social and imperial controversies and transitions. Then there is the task of relating the study of historical theology to modern systematic theology, knowing that simply retelling the history more thoroughly will not solve or resolve modern issues, for they have their own complicated genealogy. There is also the need to be aware of the involvement of different exegetical practices and presuppositions—then and now—in all of this. Finally, and most broadly or ecumenically, there are the implications that such work now has for dialogue between “Western” and “Eastern” trinitarian theology, and the questionable usefulness of such categories. That Ayres has remained sensitive to these, and other, dimensions of difficulty, while also engaging with a substantial body of literature, numerous primary texts, and diverse secondary texts (if that is still a useful distinction) makes his work both challenging and significant.

Andrew of Crete, born in Damascus in 660, led a monastic life in the monastery of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from 678 onwards. Sent on an official mission to Constantinople in 685, he preferred to stay in that city and for ten years continued his monastic practice there. When Leontius III ascended the throne in 695, Andrew was by imperial order ordained deacon of the Hagia Sophia and became head of both the local orphanage and the administration of the deaconry . In 711 he was appointed metropolitan of Crete with his see in Gortyna. In that year he signed the anathema of the 6th Council under Emperor Philippicus (711–713), thus supporting Philippicus's monotheletism, although soon afterwards he returned to orthodoxy. He stayed in Crete until 730, when Emperor Leo III called him back to the capital because of his opposition to the imperial policy that favored iconoclasm. For ten years he ventilated his resistance to that policy in his homilies but was finally exiled to Lesbos. He died on 4 July 740 in Eresos.

The story of Barabbas's release by Pilate appears in all four canonical gospels (Mark 15:6–15; Matt 27:15–26; Luke 23:18–25; John 18:39–40). Although the accounts differ in some details, a fairly consistent plot line emerges: The crowd before Pilate, allowed to choose one prisoner for release, demands the release of Barabbas and the crucifixion of Jesus. There are, however, a number of puzzling aspects to this deceptively simple story, the most significant of which is the contention of the authors that there existed a custom of the governor releasing a prisoner at the Passover festival. According to Mark and Matthew, this was a Roman custom (Mark 15:6; Matt 27:15); according to John, a Jewish custom (John 18:39). Yet, no evidence for such a custom in Judea has been found. Even more tellingly, Luke's omission of such a custom, as well as his statement in Acts 25:16, shows that he thought such a custom unbelievable. This custom is also considered by some to be at odds with the portrait of Pilate gathered from Jewish literature. Roger Aus states the case most strongly: “[Pilate] never would have allowed himself to be subject to the whims of a crowd, especially an uncontrollable one which bordered on a riot.” For these reasons many scholars have concluded that while a Barabbas may have been released by Pilate, the story as we have it in the gospels is a literary creation.

Theology in the 20th century witnessed a shift in emphasis: The talk about the last things did not have to come last any more as the traditional handbooks of systematic theology would have it; eschatology was no longer one branch of theology among others but lay at the center of our understanding of the Christian faith. My purpose in this essay is to go a step further than this rearrangement in theological discourse and examine a reversal within the theological understanding of eschatology itself. In the wake of the work of the Metropolitan of Pergamon John (Zizioulas), a different understanding of eschatology has emerged, one that recognizes in the Parousia not only the event that stands at the end of history (the apocalyptic closure of time with which certain Christian groups have always had a fascination), but also as that event that, grounded in the Eucharist, flows continuously from the and permeates every moment in history. In the following discussion I wish to trace and spell out the implications of such a novel understanding of eschatology for our theologies today. As my guides in this exploration, I take the theology of John Zizioulas and certain insights that recent research in phenomenology has placed at theology's service. This association might seem strange to the reader: What does the theology of things-to-come have in common with the philosophy of things-themselves? I would like to propose that phenomenology, especially as it has been recently formulated by a new generation of phenomenologists, such as Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Richard Kearney, can be a very helpful instrument in the hands of eucharistic eschatology in its effort to rescue eschatology from the twin risks of either immanentizing it or relegating it to an end-of-times utopia. Furthermore, the structure of an “inverted intentionality,” as exemplified by certain liturgical forms such as hymnology and iconography, will be suggested as the precise point of phenomenology's convergence with eucharistic eschatology. I write with the conviction that eschatology is in essence a “liberation” theology (freeing us from the moralistic and sociological constellations of this world) and that, as my concluding remarks illustrate, it has real, practical, day-to-day consequences for the ways we conduct our lives and our relationships with others.

Lewis Ayres's Nicaea and its Legacy has created a stir among historians of Christian doctrine since its publication. Its relation to the previously existing body of scholarship on fourth-century trinitarian theology is one of both consolidation and provocation. Ayres accomplishes a prodigious work of consolidation by synthesizing much of the groundbreaking scholarship that has lately transpired in the study of fourth-century trinitarian debates, while simultaneously making his own contributions toward retelling the narrative of these debates. Following Hanson, Simonetti, Barnes, and others, Ayres rejects a simplistic division between more or less uniform camps of Nicene and “Arian” theologies. Somewhat paradoxically, however, his distinctive contribution to this retelling is to insist on a fundamental unity between pro-Nicene camps in both the Greek and Latin traditions. While Ayres makes this point with forceful persuasion, the point itself is not controversial among patristic scholars. The assertion of a substantive rift between Eastern and Western trinitarian theologies has not held much sway within this milieu; it is not found in either Hanson or Simonetti, for instance, and its genealogy, traced back to the figure of de Régnon, has been famously exposed by Michel Barnes. What is provocative, however, is Ayres's insistence that there existed a geographically consistent “pro-Nicene” culture in both East and West that was also internally consistent as a superior construal of the “plain sense” of canonical Scripture. More provocative still is Ayres's polemical engagement, in the concluding chapter of his work, with modern systematic theology. Here, Ayres offers a sweeping dismissal of modern trinitarian theology as wallowing in a Hegelian wasteland, in bondage to methodological commitments that are antithetical to “pro-Nicene culture,” with no hope of a redeeming synthesis in sight. The only way forward is first to return to an integration of historical and systematic theology, based on a reappropriation of the basic tenets of pro-Nicene culture.

John Dewey famously argued that Darwin had introduced a new conceptual vocabulary that would completely overhaul the traditional philosophical enterprise. His sense was that the kinds of monumental metaphysical questions that philosophy typically asked about causes, trends and purposes start to look meaningless and willfully unanswerable once we absorb the tough lessons of natural selection. More specifically, Dewey thought that The Origin of Species provided a strong but beneficial dose of philosophical therapy because it illustrated how to simultaneously abandon the lifeless questions of the past while formulating new questions to take their place. Darwin's achievement revealed for Dewey that sometimes philosophical progress is not “an affair of different ways of dealing with old problems, but of relegation of the problems to the attic in which are kept the relics of former intellectual bad taste.” From this perspective, the litmus test for measuring intellectual growth is surprisingly simple. If we examine the concerns that once excited our ancestors and feel only the shudder of regret that so much energy was wasted on a lost cause, we can be reasonably confident that we have taken a few steps forward.

Justin's social context in the city of Rome may seem to have only a tenuous connection with his beliefs about God, his doctrine of the Logos and the other religious commitments for which he ultimately laid down his life. Perhaps, had Justin lived in Athens or Ephesus, he would have written much the same thing. This, after all, is a man deeply moved by Platonist philosophy and the “perception of immaterial things.” Furnished with such Platonist wings, Justin himself would surely claim to soar high over all such mundane realities as the streets, bridges, and buildings of ancient Rome. It is not surprising that the vast majority of scholarship on Justin and other early Christian intellectuals follows him on a similar trajectory.

One of the most mysterious and haunting of all medieval halakhic figures must certainly be the fourteenth-century sage Rabbi Jeruham b. Meshullam. During the sixteenth century, he was known as “Tamiri”—“the concealed one”—a moniker given to him by Joseph Karo's heavenly interlocutor, the Maggid. Years later, David Azulai, the eminent eighteenth-century rabbinic bibliographer, reported that “a number of Rabbis who had composed commentaries on his work … were summoned to the heavenly academy [i.e., they died prematurely] or their work was lost.” Even today, scholars who have never opened Jeruham's books are nevertheless aware of the “curse” hanging over the work of this medieval author.

In the wake of the investiture struggle and against the background of burgeoning humanist thought, Martin Luther's affirmation of the secular realm as a discrete area of divine activity may be lauded as a judicious recovery of the thought of Augustine and perhaps of Gelasius I. In light of subsequent developments in sociopolitical theory, however, this progressive aspect of the reformer's thought appears to be immediately undercut by its seemingly unbending social conservatism. Instituted by God (Rom 13; 1 Pet 2:13–14), the “law of [the] temporal sword has existed from the beginning of the world,” Luther writes. And while he asserts that “God cannot and will not permit anyone but himself to rule over the soul,” he does, nevertheless, forbid Christians to resort to violence to defend their cause: “For the governing authority must not be resisted by force, but only by confession of the truth. If it is influenced by this, well and good; if not, you are excused, you suffer wrong for God's sake.”

Let me turn in this “Response” to the concerns of those who have been unhappy with particular features of Nicaea and Its Legacy. Although the bulk of my discussion will be taken up with the responses of Khaled Anatolios and John Behr, I want also to range a little more widely. For the most part, criticisms of my book Nicaea have stemmed as much from opposition to my overall attitude towards the task of historical theology as from opposition to my interpretation of particular episodes of the fourth century. A range of related questions focuses on the relationship between the good practice of theology and the implications of the forms of modern historical consciousness that I have clearly found persuasive. The three critics that I engage here all seem to me to be pushing in directions that (consciously or unconsciously) inappropriately restrict the scope and character of theological—and particularly of historical theological—investigation. I must confess at the beginning of this discussion that I assumed the majority of negative responses to my project as a whole (as opposed to negative responses to particular sections of the argument) would come from what might be termed the theological “left”: those who are convinced by some of the fundamental lines of post-Enlightenment and recent liberal critique of classical Christian tradition. It has, however, been fascinating to see other critics emerge from what might perhaps be termed the theological “right”: those sympathetic to modern attempts to retrieve the centrality of classical Christian texts, theologians, and exegetical methods. Both forms of critique demand a response.

You may have heard of the Blessed Mountain.It is the highest mountain in our world.Should you reach the summit you would have only one desire,and that to descend and be with those who dwell in the deepest valley.That is why it is called the Blessed Mountain.Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam