Author: Fred Sanders

Polanus’ eighteen Axioms on the Trinity are mostly pretty short, but Axiom 14 stands out for its length and comprehensiveness. It’s as long as the other seventeen put together (3,000 words out of the total 6,000), and it covers a lot of ground. It will take several episodes to get through, but some of Polanus’…

These two axioms are very short, and fairly straightforward: Polanus wants to clarify that while the persons are distinguished by relations, this does not introduce composition in any way: the persons are not composed by relations, nor is God composed by relations. Constitution good; composition bad. Polanus also clarifies that the three persons of the…

In these two axioms, Polanus teaches how to think about God in terms of essence and relation. One of the tricky parts of this is that essence and relation are two different ways of talking about the same thing in God, which is God. Several times now, Polanus has succeeded in bringing us face to…

In this little set of axioms, Polanus wants to show that the persons of the Trinity are distinguished by real, opposed relations. He is aware that this is a packed phrase, which contains and summarizes quite a few judgments. So he eases his way into it, giving the reader just one idea at a time:…

Here’s our next conversation about the Trinity, following Polanus’ 18 Axioms. The main thing Polanus wants to clarify in this axiom is that when we speak of difference in God, it can never be difference in essence; it is instead difference in person. In the first half of Axiom 6, Polanus made this point by…

Axiom 5 is very short, but Axiom 6 is very long. So even though this is organizationally strange, we’re devoting one discussion to Axiom 5 and the first half of Axiom 6. But in our next discussion, we’ll only cover the second half of 6, so we’ll be back on track. I’ve added an index…

In his fourth axiom on the Trinity, Polanus clarifies how the persons of the Trinity are related to each other by clarifying how they are related to the divine nature. To make the point, he contrasts the right answer, homoousioi, with a number of wrong answers that he states as other compound words building on…

Is the Son like the Father, or unlike the Father? More precisely, are the Father and the Son similar in essence, or dissimilar? It’s a trick question. “Similarity” is not a useful category for talking about God’s essence. In his third Axiom, Polanus helps us understand what we can say about the persons of the…

If I could provide you with links to a nice translation of Amandus Polanus’ Axioms on the Trinity within his Syntagma Theologiae, I would. But I can’t. What Ryan Hurd and I are doing in this set of conversations is posting Ryan’s new translation of each axiom, then talking about it. So here’s the second…

Polanus (d. 1610) wrote 18 axioms on the Trinity. Ryan Hurd and I want to study them. So here’s our plan: Post Ryan’s translation of each axiom here at the Scriptorium, talk about it, post the video. Welcome to the first axiom: Axiom 1. The sacred Trinity is God—indeed, the single, only God. To understand…

Four hundred years ago, one of Protestantism’s most accomplished theologians published a series of eighteen guidelines (“axiomata”) for understanding the Trinity. They’re great. They have never been translated into English. Nobody talks about them. Until now! [cue movie trailer] When I stumbled upon Amandus Polanus’ eighteen Axiomata buried deep in the trinitarian section of his…