My PhD Thesis – A Perichoretic Model of the Church. The Trinitarian Ecclesiology of Dumitru Staniloae Has Been Published

Dear friends,

I am very glad to share with you that the original text of my PhD thesis, titled A Perichoretic Model of the Church. The Trinitarian Ecclesiology of Dumitru Staniloae, that I have defended in 2004 at London School of Theology (Brunel University) has just been published by Lambert Academic Publishing in Germany.

I am aware that for some of my friends and colleagues, who have made a career  in the academia, LAP is, for many reasons, not necessarily the most prestigious publisher possible. Nevertheless, my constant travel in the last 10 years, and potentially in the years to come, could not allow me the leisure to transform this doctoral thesis into an actual book. This unavoidable reality made be decide for a publisher, LAP,  that did not require any ulterior editing, except the necessary formatting of the text for digital publishing.

I am glad that the text of my thesis is available now for academic use. I am afraid the price of the book (over $100) is prohibitive for individual readers, but I hope that libraries of theological schools interested in Orthodox theology will purchase it to put it at the disposal of their students.

The book is available online from Amazon, Book Depository and other providers. It will soon be available also for purchase in digital form.

I hope and pray the God will give me now the time and energy to finalise editing of the Romanian translation of the thesis, so that I could publish this also, for the Romanian theological environment.

Here is a short presentation of the book, for the backcover:

This study seeks to investigate the trinitarian consistency of Dumitru Staniloae’s general ecclesiology, by use of a ‘perichoretic model of the church’, rooted in the patristic concept of trinitarian perichoresis, which describes the reciprocal interpenetration of the divine persons, based on their common divine ousia. Staniloae makes his eastern patristic understanding of the Trinity the foundation of his whole theological construction, including his ecclesiology. For him, the Church, as a theo-anthropic reality, is called to be an icon of the Trinity, a true reflection in space and time of the perichoretic relations existing eternally between the divine persons of the triune God. This calls for an ecclesiology that is rooted equally in Christology and in pneumatology, any imbalance in this dynamic leading, in Staniloae’s opinion, either to excessive institutionalism and authoritarianism or to exaggerated individualism and subjectivism. The trinitarian inconsistencies revealed by the investigation model we have used arise more from the characteristic clericalist and sacramentalist tendencies inherent to Orthodoxy in general, than from the particular nature of Staniloae’s theology.

I want to thank again my thesis supervisor, Dr. Graham McFarlane, as well as Professors Tony Lane (London School of Theology) and Andrew Walker (King’s College London) the internal and external PhD examiners, for this extremely illuminating experience, both spiritually and intellectually.

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