Richard A. Muller sets out the concepts and distinctions that Reformed theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used when they spoke about the essence, the attributes and the Trinitarian nature of God.

In doing so he dismantles the caricature of Calvin and his successors as revolutionary thinkers, showing where they retrieved their categories, what pressures required them to refine them, and how much of the older tradition they deliberately kept. A work of careful retrieval with direct bearing on current debates about divine simplicity.