The Deep Things of God - A Review

Mark Lauterbach provides a great review of Fred Sanders' book, The Deep Things of God.   His conclusion:

For some years now I have been dipping into writings on the Trinity and the early church fathers. I have noted their influence on early Protestants too. I am one who, without reading them, used to think the fathers missed it. I now think, and Sanders confirms, that they got it better than I do. When they wrote the Trinitarian creeds, they had a grasp of the deep source of our salvation. God the Father Almighty, his only Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son are working symphonically to save, to redeem, and to exalt the bride of Christ into their presence. Chalcedon was profound.

Some may not have missed these rich resources of faith. Perhaps I have just been in the narrow confines of sectarian American evangelicalism. But the early church fathers had a grasp on God in Trinity and the Incarnation that is rooted in Scripture and life-shaping. I want to consider it more.

Fred is in that tradition, though he carefully confines his citations to the rich resources within Protestant evangelicalism. He is not calling us to become liturgical. He is calling us to bring out of the background what we know to be true. He is calling us to rediscover the resources of our our tributary of the Great Tradition.

I for one want to go back to learn from those men and the ones who went before them. I am grateful for this book which I hope sells out and is reprinted and circulated to as many people as possible. It is a gift to see the glory of the Triune God as the root and foundation of our redemption.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

Read the rest.