Abstract

Brannon Ellis’s book Calvin, Classical Trinitarianism, and the Aseity of the Son is a detailed historical theological study of Calvin’s defense of the doctrine of the self-existence of the person of the Son. The text emphasizes and endorses Calvin’s defense of the necessity and authority of special revelation and the biblical credentials of a distinction between two ways of speaking of God: nonrelatively as to the divine essence, and relatively as to the persons. With these commitments in mind, Calvin’s defense of the aseity of the Son brings the full authority of Trinitarian confession to bear on philosophical theology and implicates at a methodological level the rationalistic tendencies of Thomistic natural theology and perfect being theology.