Quest for Trinity: Doctrine of God in Scripture, History and Modernity. By Stephen R. Holmes. Downers Grove, 111.: IVP Academic, an imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2012. xix + 230 pp. $26.00 (paper).Stephen R. Holmes's Quest for Trinity is a challenging book. It assumes capacity to understand the most abstruse of theological differences (p. 28). And it calls into question, if not dismisses altogether, a major claim of contemporary accounts of Trinity: that doctrine of Trinity can in and of itself ground egalitarian and liberating ethics and ecclesiology. This is a book for those who have read widely and thought deeply about doctrine of Trinity.Holmes argues that even most exacting and careful expositions of Trinity today-those of Volf, Moltmann, Boff, and Jenson-either misunderstand or depart from the traditional doctrine ... settled in fourth century (p. xv). At least two moves constitute this departure. first pertains to grounding egalitarian and liberating views of church and of social ethics in very nature of God. Doing so requires seeing inner relations of God (the immanent Trinity) as fundamentally mutually giving and receiving love. But to see immanent Trinity in this way, authors like Volf and Boff have to see perichoresis as decisive principle of ordering, rather than origin. In this way they differentiate between relations of origin and eternal relations of love in (p. 27). This differentiation does not occur in patristic doctrine, as Zizioulas notes. Insofar as theologians claim to be retrieving, reconstructing, or building on tradition (as both content and process), this first move is highly problematic and requires, at least, a straightforward and clear methodological explanation.The other move is more fundamental theologically, with greater risks in theology, ethics, worship, and various practices. That is, in recent discussions of Trinity, certain concepts, notably person, are seen as univocal, or at least as very closely analogical, when applied to divine persons and human people (p. 29). issue here? more human beings are seen as like God in fundamental ways, more likely we are to lose sight of sheer otherness of God, and more likely we are to cast God as man in a loud voice (as Barth had it).Holmes is very exacting in substantiating these claims. He begins with most important biblical texts in Old and New Testament, noting that while contemporary theologians may not want to see Old Testament as prefiguring New, there is even so ample evidence of some sense of complexity in God before common era. But Holmes's main point here is to indicate what texts were important in patristic era, many of which are not ones that Christians today would consider Trinitarian.Holmes then turns to early patristic developments in order to lay groundwork for debates of fourth century. In two chapters on these debates, he builds to a clear statement of Cappadocian Trinitarianism: The Godhead is simple, and exists thrice-over, in hypostases distinguished by relations of origin, and not otherwise (p. 116).The next chapter focuses Holmes's argument that Augustine is the greatest interpreter of Cappadocian theology (pp. 121-122)-a controversial claim. following chapter on medieval period argues that filioque controversy does not signal a substantive difference in doctrine between East and West. …