1/x. I've stirred up the analytic philosophy hornets & I don't know how to reply to all the diff. comments at once so I'll just tweet & hopefully those who need to see this will. I got in trouble for claiming that AP ignores history. So here is some nuance & some examples.

2/x. 1st, I was talking about analytic philosophy, not the newer thing called analytic theology, about which I know little. I have Crisp's book, Analyzing Doc, & look forward to reading it. I hope the label "analytic" does not mean the same thing for theology as it means in phil.

3/x. 2nd, by "ignore" I mean not seeing oneself as participating in a living trad of orthodoxy understood as an ongoing convo w. certain foundations understood & accepted by all. I refer here primarily to understanding 4th C pro-Nicene theol as the context for the Nicene Creed.

4/x. 3rd, to confess the Nicene Creed verbally is not enough for a theologian/phil'er (as it might be for a simple believer). There must be understanding of the hist context: what led to the choice of terms, what was being ruled out by a specific word, the exeg. method used etc.

5/x. Another key pt is that Thomas, in Q. 1-43 of ST, was merely summarizing & clarifying the pro-Nicene consensus that had become the orthodox trad. I've heard people justify rejecting simplicity, for eg., by explaining "I'm not a Thomist" as if only Thomists believed that.

6/x. At the end of Ch. 1 of Quest for the Trinity, S. Holmes mentions Plantings, Leftow & Rea as examples of AP's who subject traditional doc to rigid tests for logical validity w/o understanding the dynamics of 4th C thot well enough to see what actually is being said there.

7/x. They seem not to understand that the Cappadocians considered & rejected social trinitarianism. I am not merely saying they "ignored" hist as in "didn't talk about it." I mean they don't inhabit the tradition in the sense described above. Another eg. is Richard Swinburne.

8/x. Here is an Oxford chair holder who has written a trilogy on God & seems to be a theistic personalist, as far as I can see. My biggest problem with him is that he seems to think he is a Nicene Xian. As the older Thomists phrased it, he seems to have "invincible ignorance."

9/x. This thread is too long, but my point is that AP shares (often unwittingly) in the mod conceit that we know better & that philosophy has progressed since the days of the early church. It most emphatically has not.