The Trinitarian Theology of St Thomas Aquinas Book

One of the best books I've read on the Trinity, and definitely an indispensable guide to Aquinas' theology of God in terms of both speculative and scriptural reasoning. Emery corrects the persistent (mid)reading of Aquinas, according to which Aquinas treats God entirely in abstraction from the earlier Church Fathers and the economy of salvation revealed in scripture. The "speculative" and the "scriptural" do not stand in conflict in Aquinas' hands. Instead, they are mutually illuminating. As Emery says, reading the economy of salvation and the temporal missions of the triune persons is no less speculative simply because it focuses on revealed history. Any reading of the NT that attempts to makes sense of the co-implicated identities of Father, Son, and Spirit is by nature speculative.

One of the most rewarding chapters, and one that makes most explicit the union of speculative and scriptural in Aquinas' trinitarian theology, discusses the history and Aquinas' refinement of appropriation. This chapter also helps to abate the criticisms that charge Aquinas of having an insufficiently trinitarian conception of the divine essence and attributes, for as Emery argues, appropriation allows for scriptural connections between divine action and specific persons of the Trinity to enrich the conceptual content of essential attributes. What can simply be named of God with a degree of agnosticism according to the essence is made specific through appropriation.

A must read for trinitarian theology in general, and especially for anyone hoping to understand Aquinas thinking on the Christian God.