Dumitru Staniloae's Ecumenical & Trinitarian Ecclesiology

Recently the international trilingual juried journal of which I am editor, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, published an essay treating many of the same themes as that author has now developed at length in his new book: Dumitru Staniloae’s Trinitarian Ecclesiology: Orthodoxy and the Filioque by Viorel Coman (Fortress, 2019), 310pp.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I think Staniloae one of the most important Orthodox theologians of the last century, and that Radu Bordeianu's book on him remains one of the most significant treatments in ecclesiology this century. (See my interview with Radu here.) It is good, then, that Staniloae continues to get much deserved attention from young scholars. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Dumitru Stăniloae is one of the most important but routinely neglected twentieth-century Orthodox theologians. Viorel Coman explores the ecumenical relevance of Stăniloae’s reflections on the interplay between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the church in the context of the debates on the ecclesiological ramifications of the filioque. Coman combines a historical and theological analysis of Stăniloae’s approach to the filioque, Trinity, and church. The historical analysis shows the changes that have taken place over time in Stăniloae’s approach to the issue of the filioque and the doctrine of the church. The theological analysis emphasizes the ecumenical contribution of the Romanian thinker to the fields of Trinitarian theology and ecclesiology. Even though this book centers primarily around Stăniloae’s vision on the link between the doctrine of the Trinity and the Church, it places his theological reflections in a solid dialogue with other Eastern (Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, and John Zizioulas) and Western theologians (Karl Barth, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and Walter Kasper).

The Complexities of Monotheism

Often my students, including many self-identified Christian ones, have to admit, at least grudgingly, that they do not really understand Trinitarian theology and therefore find certain Islamic criticisms of the same to be unduly compelling--invariably based on a superficial reading of both. These are not, of course, new issues; but a new book, released last week, is giving them fresh and welcome attention:  Monotheism and Its Complexities: Christian and Muslim Perspectives, eds. Lucinda Mosher and David Marshall (Georgetown University Press, 2018), 208pp.

About this collection we are told:

Conventional wisdom would have it that believing in one God is straightforward; that Muslims are expert at monotheism, but that Christians complicate it, weaken it, or perhaps even abandon it altogether by speaking of the Trinity. In this book, Muslim and Christian scholars challenge that opinion. Examining together scripture texts and theological reflections from both traditions, they show that the oneness of God is taken as axiomatic in both, and also that affirming God's unity has raised complex theological questions for both. The two faiths are not identical, but what divides them is not the number of gods they believe in.

The latest volume of proceedings of The Building Bridges Seminar ― a gathering of scholar-practitioners of Islam and Christianity that meets annually for the purpose of deep study of scripture and other texts carefully selected for their pertinence to the year's chosen theme ― this book begins with a retrospective on the seminar's first fifteen years and concludes with an account of deliberations and discussions among participants, thereby providing insight into the model of vigorous and respectful dialogue that characterizes this initiative.

Contributors include Richard Bauckham, Sidney Griffith, Christoph Schwöbel, Janet Soskice, Asma Afsaruddin, Maria Dakake, Martin Nguyen, and Sajjad Rizvi. To encourage further dialogical study, the volume includes those scripture passages and other texts on which their essays comment. A unique resource for scholars, students, and professors of Christianity and Islam.

God, Sex, and the Desiring Self's Repetitive Liturgics

The recent news that the venerable Norris-Hulse professorship of divinity in the University of Cambridge is passing from Sarah Coakley to Catherine Pickstock is as good an occasion as any to draw attention to some of the works of both of these extraordinarily luminous women, and to record some longer and long-overdue thoughts about Coakley's God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity' (Cambridge UP, 2013).

In 1997 Pickstock's doctoral dissertation was published as After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. It rightly attracted a good deal of attention, both for its own rather stunning argumentation but also because its author was involved with John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy crowd, even to the point of the two of them editing a book Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. I devoured both books within weeks of publication, and contacted both Pickstock and Milbank (during his brief stint at the University of Virginia) about doctoral work with them.

That RO movement attracts far less attention today than it did twenty, and even ten, years ago. But Pickstock's After Writing nonetheless was, and remains, the most far-reaching and intellectually sophisticated critical analysis of the problems of liturgical reform at and after Vatican II. I have always maintained that her central point, about the abolition of structural repetition (treated also in a different fashion in a later book: Repetition and Identity) based on a suspect modern notion of linear time is the most damning criticism made against the reforms in the Latin Church which influenced, in turn, similar reforms in Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and elsewhere. I have yet to see anyone address this criticism in any serious way. To my mind this attempt at abolishing repetition is the greatest weakness of Western liturgics, as I argued at length elsewhere more than fifteen years ago now.

Let me turn now to Coakley, who did me the honour last July of being respondent to my paper at a conference at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota on reception history. She was as gracious an interlocutor as she is learned and it was a delight to converse with her.

This book of hers, God, Sexuality, and the Self, is the first of a projected four-volume systematics. Eastern Christians who might at this point be getting ready to pounce with objections to this method ("systematics" is not Eastern!) or to its author (she's Anglican! and she claims to be a priest!! who's influenced by feminism!!!) need to sit down and be quiet. She's grappling with questions that the Orthodox and Catholic Churches are grappling with in the same cultural context. And she's doing so in a way and via a method perfectly orthodox: by looking to see what the Fathers especially have to say, and how they can point us forward beyond the impasse of capitulating to the culture on all matters sexual, on the one hand, or merely repeating traditionalist slogans on the other while hoping these questions somehow go away.

She lays out in the introduction some of her major interlocutors: of the ancients, Plato, Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Augustine, and Ps-Dionysius (about whom see this co-edited work of Coakley); of the moderns, she begins with Freud and the question of desire, arguing that "desire is more fundamental than 'sex'" (10). For God (unlike for us), desire indicates no lack, but instead is the "longing love" God has for His creation to flourish in the fullness of life within the Godhead. It is this treatment of desire that is, to my mind, the most central and compelling part of her book.


At the outset Coakley is positioning herself by noting that desire for God is ultimately what is missing in contemporary "secular" discussions about sexual desire, sexual orientation, and sexual differentiation ("gender"). What Christianity, especially that informed by both Platonic and patristic sources, brings to the discussion, as she has argued in another book, is an emphasis on asceticism which, together with prayer "too deep for words" allows us to purify that desire and to be purified of any illusions we may have about God. Indeed, this focus on prayer is a central and distinctive feature of Coakley's work as she pushes back, rightly, against the tendency to treat theology purely as an intellectual endeavor: "theology in its proper sense is always in via as practitional" (45).

This emphasis on practice is not a means of escape either from hard metaphysical thinking, or the perhaps even harder task of working against injustice in the world. It is only in prayer and especially silence that we can hear the voices of those who are suffering and are marginalized--voices which, Coakley says, are often drowned out by our own high-minded calls to alleviate that suffering without first allowing the sufferers themselves to speak in their own terms.

As she continues to circle closer into her focus on desire, Coakley argues that "desire is also more fundamental than gender, and that the key to the secular riddle of gender can lie only in its connection to the doctrine of the trinitarian God" (52), a point I am very glad to hear someone else making. I attempted to make it several years ago in debates about same-sex relations in a theological context, saying that ultimately arguments from "authority" or "tradition" cut very little ice today even with people inside the Church; the only serious argument must centre on the nature of the triune God.

Coakley here introduces--with promise of more to come--her very sensitive and careful discussion of the 'threeness' of God and the 'twoness' of human gender, saying that hers "is a theory about gender's mysterious and plastic openness to divine transfiguration" (58). All the Christians currently freaking out about "transgenderism" would do well to think on Coakley for a while and the tradition she draws on. Any time you posit that the human person, divided into male and female, is created in the image of the undivided and sexless Trinity you are going to have very serious and difficult questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation vis-à-vis the Trinity.

Questions of transgenderism and sexuality invite contributions from sociology, psychology, gender studies, and other fields, and Coakley's book is especially helpful in laying out nine guidelines (pp.88-92) for such conversations as part of her project of théologie totale. The graciousness with which she engages these questions, and the honesty of her work, comes throughout the book, and is summed up again at the very end, where she notes that "the contemplative is the one who is forced to acknowledge the 'messy entanglement' of sexual desire and the desire for God" (340). Contemplation, with asceticism, also re-orders the passions, changes and purifies our desire for God, offers a safeguard against illusions and idols: "the hermeneutics of suspicion never comes to an end" (343). 

For these and many other insights in this densely argued, but carefully and clearly written, work, let all the people say: Deo gratias. And let us keep watch for the next volumes in her work.

The Bible and the Trinity

The Catholic University of America Press sent me their newest catalogue, which contains several books of interest, including one set for release early in 2018: The Bible and Early Trinitarian Theology, eds. Christopher A Beeley and Mark E Weedman.

A number of prominent scholars are featured in the book, including the Orthodox priest and scholar Bogdan G. Bucur of Duquesne University.

About this scholarly collection we are told:

The past thirty years have seen an unprecedented level of interest in early Christian biblical interpretation, from major scholarly initiatives to more popular resources aimed at pastors and general readers. The fields of Biblical Studies and Patristics/Early Christian Studies each arrived at the study of early Christian biblical interpretation largely from their own standpoints, and they tend to operate in relative isolation from one another. This books aims to bring the two fields into closer conversation, in order to suggest new avenues into the study of the deeply biblical dimension of patristic theology as well as the contribution that patristic exegesis can make to contemporary views of how best to interpret the Bible.

Based on a multi-year consultation in the Society of Biblical Literature, The Bible and Early Trinitarian Theology features leading scholars from both fields, who bring new insights to the relationship between patristic exegesis and current strategies of biblical interpretation, specifically with reference to the doctrine of the Trinity. Following an account of how each field came to study patristic exegesis, the book offers new studies of Trinitarian theology in Old Testament, Johannine, and Pauline biblical texts and the patristic interpretation of them, combining the insights of modern historical criticism with classical historical theology. It promises to make a valuable contribution to both fields, suggesting several new avenue into the study of early biblical literature and the development of Trinitarian theology.

John the Damascene

Often considered in the West the last of the Eastern or Greek Fathers, and widely recognized as an early if sharp and polemical critic of Islam, with which he had first-hand knowledge in Syria, John the Damascene continues to fascinate. A Paris-based scholar's several articles on John's life are collected in another volume from the Variorum series by Ashgate. Though not inexpensive, the virtue of these collections is that it brings together in one place articles that may often have escaped attention upon first publication in more recondite academic journals.

Vassa Kontouma, John of Damascus: New Studies on His Life and Works (Ashgate Variorum Collected Studies, 2015), 266pp.
About this book the publisher tells us:

For more than five hundred years the life and work of John of Damascus (c. 655-c.745) have been the subject of a very extensive literature, scholarly and popular, in which it is often difficult to get one's bearings. Through the studies included here (of which 6 appear in a translation into English made specially for this volume), Vassa Kontouma provides a critical review of this literature and attempts to answer several open questions: the author and date of composition of the official Life of John, the philosophical significance of the Dialectica (a study which has its first publication here), the original structure of the Exposition of the Orthodox faith, the identity of ps.-Cyril, the authenticity of the Letter on Great Lent, and questions of Mariology. She also opens new vistas for research along four main lines: the life of John of Damascus and its sources, Neochalcedonian philosophy, systematic theology in Byzantium, and Christian practices under the Umayyads.

For those who want more insight at less cost, a recent Kindle edition, in the Princeton Theological Monograph series, will surely provide that: Charles Twombly, Perichoresis and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus. 

About this new publication we are told:

Perichoresis (mutual indwelling) is a concept used extensively in the so-called Trinitarian revival; and yet no book-length study in English exists probing how the term actually developed in the "classical period" of Christian doctrine and how it was carefully deployed in relation to Christian dogma. Consequently, perichoresis is often used in imprecise and even careless ways.
This path-breaking study aims at placing our understanding of the term on firmer footing, clarifying its actual usage in relation to doctrines of God, Christ, and salvation in the thought of John of Damascus, the eighth-century theologian, monk, and hymn writer who gave it its historically influential application.
Since John summed up a whole theological tradition, this work provides not only an introduction to his theological vision but also to the key themes of Greek patristic thought generally and thereby lays an essential foundation for those who would dig deeper into the present-day usefulness of perichoresis.

"Those who have delved deep in the resources of patristic theology for the sake of theological renewal have long seen the concept of perichoresis as a vein of gold. But few have explored to sufficient degree the term's complexity and versatility. Twombly's book shows us how much potential treasure lies hidden by offering an extended meditation on the most fundamental structures of John Damascene's 'perichoretic theology.' His study is greatly to be welcomed and offers much to any student of early Christian thought."
--Lewis Ayres, Professor of Historical Theology, Durham University, Durham, UK

Discovering the Trinity in Disability

My friends, the lovely newlyweds Tom and Annette Hrywna, came to town recently (much as Her Majesty occasionally leaves London on a tour from the imperial capital to the lesser provinces) spreading connubial bliss and bringing with them a large box of new books that had been accumulating at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in Ottawa. Among the choice selections that came to me, having previously escaped my attention, was Myroslaw Tataryn and Maria Truchan-Tataryn, Discovering Trinity in Disability: A Theology for Embracing Difference (Novalis/Orbis, 2013), 144pp.

For those who don't know, Fr. Myroslaw is a Ukrainian Greco-Catholic priest and scholar. He is the author of important scholarly studies such as Augustine and Russian Orthodoxy as well as editor of such collections as Windows to the East.

This current book is co-authored with his wife, a fellow academic and mother. I hope to interview them both in the coming weeks.

About this book the publisher tells us:

From the gospels it would appear that the disabled have a special claim on Jesus love and attention. And yet this does not appear to be the case in the church. Drawing on scripture, theology, and the personal experience of their daughter s severe disability, the authors explore the theological meaning of disability and the special insights it afford into the mystery of God's Trinitarian being (God as an inclusive community).

The Trinity in the Life of the Church

This coming Sunday is, for most Western Christians, celebrated as Trinity Sunday, often the bane of preachers who must try to make sense of what the human mind can only dimly grasp. Too often, I suspect, most of us are like Dorothy Sayers: "The Father is incomprehensible, the Son is incomprehensible, the whole damned thing is incomprehensible." But next year those preachers will surely have some help in a new book to be released this fall under the editorship of Khaled Anatolios, whom I interviewed here about his last, and justly celebrated, book Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine. 

This new book is a collection of articles by leading and well-known scholars: The Holy Trinity in the Life of the Church (Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History) (Baker Academic, 2014), 272pp.

About this book we are told:

In this volume, a noted theologian brings together an ecumenical roster of leading scholars to explore trinitarian faith as it is concretely experienced in the life of the church. Drawing upon and fostering renewed interest in trinitarian theology, the contributors--including Brian E. Daley, John Behr, and Kathleen McVey--clarify the centrality of trinitarian doctrine in salvation, worship, and life. This is the third volume in Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History, a partnership between Baker Academic and the Pappas Patristic Institute of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. The series is a deliberate outreach by the Orthodox community to Protestant and Catholic seminarians, pastors, and theologians.

The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity in Paperback

In late 2011, when it first emerged in hardback, I interviewed editors Matthew Levering and Gilles Emery about their splendid new collection The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity. That edition is packed with riches, including numerous articles by Orthodox scholars and treating Eastern realities, which perhaps goes some way to explaining its hefty price. But for those of you wishing an edition both lighter in your bookbag and on your wallet, you need only wait a few more months. Oxford UP tells me that a paperback is forthcoming this summer (likely July), and will be less than half the hardback, probably around $42.

About this book we are told:

This handbook examines the history of Trinitarian theology and reveals the Nicene unity still at work among Christians today despite ecumenical differences and the variety of theological perspectives. The forty-three chapters are organized into the following seven parts: the Trinity in Scripture, Patristic witnesses to the Trinitarian faith, Medieval appropriations of the Trinitarian faith, the Reformation through to the 20th Century, Trinitarian Dogmatics, the Trinity and Christian life, and Dialogues (addressing ecumenical, interreligious, and cultural interactions).

The phrase 'Trinitarian faith' can hardly be understood outside of reference to the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople and to their reception: the doctrine of the Trinity is indissociably connected to the reading of Scripture through the ecclesial and theological traditions. The modern period is characterized especially by the arrival of history, under two principal aspects: 'historical theology' and 'philosophies of history'. In contemporary theology, the principal 'theological loci' are Trinity and creation, Trinity and grace, Trinity and monotheism, Trinity and human life (ethics, society, politics and culture), and more broadly Trinity and history. In all these areas, this handbook offers essays that do justice to the diversity of view points, while also providing, insofar as possible, a coherent ensemble.

Arabic Trinitarianism?

It's a bit of a commonplace that Islam and Christianity sharply differ on the question of the Trinity. But as with most commonplaces, it obscures some important details. A book published this summer takes us into the world of Early Arabic Christian Contributions to Trinitarian Theology (Fortress Press, 2013), 160pp.
Authored by Thomas Ricks, the volume is a revision of his doctoral dissertation under the great Sidney Griffith. About this book the publisher tells us:

The doctrine of the Trinity is the keystone of Christian faith and teaching, yet most of the secondary accounts on the development of this crucial doctrine do not extend beyond Nicaea and pay scant attention to vital cultural traffic. In this volume, the author examines the exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity in a set of texts from key Arabic Christian thinkers from the eighth and ninth centuries and demonstrates that fresh thinking of this cornerstone doctrine occurred in the new context of a regnant Islamic culture; in this context, Christian theologians discovered the salience of the Nicene doctrine while engaging a new religious partner. The author provides an overlooked angle on the history of Trinitarian theology and brings attention to several profound Christian figures rarely found in Western accounts.

St. Basil the Great

In March of next year, in an imprint from Baker Academic devoted to exegetical issues, a new book will be coming out about one of the great Fathers of the Greek East: Stephen M. Hildebrand, Basil of Caesarea (Baker Academic, March 2014), 240pp.

About this book we are told:

Fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea was an erudite Scripture commentator, an architect of Trinitarian theology, a founder of monasticism, and a metropolitan bishop. This introduction to Basil's thought surveys his theological, spiritual, and monastic writings, showing the importance of his work for contemporary theology and spirituality. It brings together various aspects of Basil's thought into a single whole and explores his uniqueness and creativity as a theologian. The volume engages specialized scholarship on Basil but makes his thought accessible to a wider audience. It is the third book in a series on the church fathers edited by Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering.

The author is no stranger to Basil, having previously authored The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea: A Synthesis of Greek Thought and Biblical Faith.

Hildebrand was, additionally, the translator for On the Holy Spirit: St. Basil the Great, this latter being part of the Popular Patristics series from St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. 

Rethinking Trinitarian Theology

As I have had several occasions to note before, perhaps most clearly in my interview with Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, we have been seeing a revival of interest in Trinitarian theology (as well as the history of its development) for the last couple of decades.

In the Orthodox world, one of the most prominent voices, in Trinitarian theology and much else, has been John Zizioulas, who remains one of the biggest names in Eastern Christian theology today, and has for some time. He began to make his mark in the anglophone world with the 1985 publication of his landmark work Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. This is a work that has been regularly and widely cited in the literature across traditions--one often notices it in Protestant and Catholic, as well as Orthodox, works. Many of the themes in this book were continued in the 2007 book Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (T&T Clark).

A sense of the breadth of engagement of Zizioulas (who is not without his critics in Orthodoxy, including perhaps especially Lucian Turcescu) may be seen in such studies as Paul Collins, Trinitarian Theology West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers, and John Zizioulas from 2001 as well as the collection edited by Douglas Knight, The Theology of John Zizioulas, and Paul McPartlan's own early work, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri De Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue.

Zizioulas is not always easy to read both for the profundity of the matters he discusses as well as for the style of his writing, especially in Being as Communion. For that reason, I always recommend starting with his very lovely, and generally accessible, collection, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, which I have used with great profit in several different classes.

Zizioulas authors a chapter on the Trinity in the recently published collection, Giulio Maspero and Robert Wozniak, ed., Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions And Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2012), 512pp. There are other chapters in this book of interest to Eastern Christians, including on the Fathers as well as two chapters about the Holy Spirit and the filioque. About this book we are told: 

The book aims at showing the most important topics and paradigms in modern Trinitarian theology. It is supposed to be a comprehensive guide to the many traces of development of Trinitarian faith. As such it is thought to systematize the variety of contemporary approaches to the field of Trinitarian theology in the present philosophical-cultural context. The main goal of the publication is not only a description of what happened to Trinitarian theology in the modern age. It is rather to indicate the typically modern specificity of the Trinitarian debate and - first of all - to encourage development in the main areas and issues of this subject.

Controversial Controversies

Set for October release from Fortress Press are reprinted editions (with new covers, not shown here) of two slender volumes originally published more than 30 years ago which introduced generations of students to some of the most important debates of early Christian history: William G. Rusch, ed. and trans., Trinitarian Controversy (Sources of Early Christian Thought) and its companion volume (one of several in the original series), Richard A. Norris, ed. and trans., The Christological Controversy. 

About the latter volume, the publisher tells us:

This book is a collection of texts designed to illustrate the development of Christian thought about the person of Christ in the patristic era. The earliest text translated comes from the latter half of the second century, when the ideas and problems which were to dominate Christological thought in this period were first crystallized. The latest is the well-known "Definition of the Faith" of the Council of Chalcedon, which generally has been accepted as defining the limits of Christological orthodoxy.

Dumitru Staniloae on the Love of the Trinity

As I have noted before, we are seeing a resurgence of interest in Trinitarian theology. Along comes another new book from a man widely regarded as the most important Romanian theologian of the twentieth century, and one of the most influential Orthodox thinkers of our time: Dumitru Staniloae, The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012), 106pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The dogma of the Holy Trinity has always been at the center of Orthodox theology, which is why it was an endless subject of reflection for Fr. Dumitru Staniloae, may he rest in peace. The special place that the Trinity occupies in his teaching on the Church makes Fr. Staniloae the theologian par excellence of the Holy Trinity in the contemporary world. In fact, his entire corpus is a mammoth effort to place the unspeakable mystery of the Holy Trinity at the center of all recent Christian life and thought. As with St. Maximus the Confessor, whose work he has translated and commentated on in Romanian, this dogma does not represent an isolated theme for Fr. Staniloae. His exegeses of the Trinity glimmer throughout every chapter of his dogmatic theology. While identifying both a united absolute essence and distinct absolute hypostases at the heart of the Holy Trinity, in the most Orthodox spirit Fr. Staniloae always aimed to bring the living, dynamic personalism of Orthodox Christian theology into the light. Speaking as no one else in contemporary theology has about the infinite value of the person, about its unfathomable depths, and seeing "the undying face of God" in man, Fr. Staniloae can also speak about the perfect love whose only source is the Holy Trinity. - His Beatitude Patriarch Teoctist of Romania (+2007)

Trinitarian Theology of St. Gregory Palamas

Les Éditions du Cerf continues to bring out welcome studies on Orthodoxy and patristics for francophone Orthodoxy, including this recent volume:  Amphiloque Radovic, Le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité selon saint Grégoire de Palamas (2012), 336pp. 

 About this book the publisher tells us: 

Le présent volume est la traduction française de la thèse de doctorat de Mgr Amphiloque Radovic, éditée pour la première fois dans une langue occidentale. Publié en 1973 dans la collection du Centre patriarcal des études patristiques « Vlatadôn » (Thessalonique), considéré en Grèce comme l'un des dix meilleurs livres théologiques du XXe siècle, cet ouvrage est une référence dans le domaine des études des Pères de l'Église. 

Pour Mgr Amphiloque, le thème principal des écrits palamites, à savoir la distinction entre l'essence et les énergies divines, ne peut être compris que dans son contexte triadologique et christologique. La pensée de saint Grégoire Palamas (XIVe siècle) est, à ce titre, fidèle à la vérité biblique et à la Tradition de l'Église. Le métropolite Amphiloque analyse, dans un premier temps, la théorie palamite de la possibilité de la connaissance de la Sainte Trinité et sa manifestation, puis l'enseignement de Palamas sur le Dieu tri-hypostatique, enfin la question des unions et des distinctions dans la Sainte Trinité. Il porte une attention particulière à la critique palamite du « Filioque », qui est inséparable de l'enseignement sur l'unique action (= énergie) de la Sainte Trinité. Cette critique est encore d'actualité et demeure le point de départ de toute discussion théologique entre les Églises orthodoxe et catholique. Selon Mgr Amphiloque, si saint Grégoire Palamas établit une distinction entre l'Être éternel de la Trinité divine et sa manifestation, par économie de son énergie, c'est pour défendre la communion avec Dieu et la réalité de l'expérience mystique, qui est l'essence même de l'Église. 

En ce sens, la question de la distinction de la « théologie » et de l'« économie » dans la Trinité est une question sotériologique et non philosophique. Saint Grégoire Palamas affirme la grandeur et la richesse inexprimables de la Sainte Trinité, mais également la grandeur de l'homme, ancré dans son élévation infinie à travers la communion avec Dieu le Père, le Fils et le Saint-Esprit dans sa gloire éternelle.