SIMPLY GOD
Recovering the classical Trinity
By Peter Sanlon
IVP. 240 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978 1 783 591 046
Peter Sanlon’s Simply God is an ambitious book. It is ambitious because in a book market saturated with populist volumes it addresses the doctrine of God and the idea of his simplicity in particular. In doing so Sanlon seeks to demonstrate why the understanding of God found in the classical theological tradition is important. It is a task in which he largely succeeds.
At the heart of Sanlon’s enterprise is an attempt to restore an appreciation of God in the splendour of his majesty. In order to do so we must cease to think of God as a grown-up version of humanity and think of him as ‘radically other’. As such he is the God who can only be known through his self-revelation.
Relationship with God
The author then explains the importance of the concept of divine simplicity and how it relates to God’s attributes of timelessness, omnipotence and impassibility. He is keen however to impress upon us that this classical view of God does not undermine his rela-tionality, but rather it is central to it. This theme of relationality is explored in the second half of the book as he considers God’s love and his threeness. A final chapter seeks to establish how this classical view of God helps us in our relationship with the world.
IVP are to be commended for their willingness to publish this serious work on doctrine. I have perhaps one reservation as a reviewer— I am not quite sure to whom I would recommend this book. The subject matter is important but given the amount of material that is devoted to historical theological discussions I doubt the extent of its appeal. This is a great pity since Sanlon’s aim is to help us ‘think and speak more faithfully about God’. This is something with which we all need help.
