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Embracing the Trinity

Reviewed by Philip Joy.

This is not a beginner’s guide to the theology of the Trinity, but a call to live out the Trinity as a way of life. Before reviewing it, I re-read Stuart Olyottt’s The Three are One, an excellent, step by step, scriptural proof of the Trinity, but Sanders has a different purpose in mind. The clue is in the title - embracing - the point being that right now our Trinitarian theology has become reductionist and we would rather leave it alone than get bogged down in its apparently confusing depths. Result: we are a lesser breed of evangelicals than our forefathers (by which Sanders seems to include the Puritans). To restore evangelicalism, we need to recapture the Trinity as central to discipleship, faith, prayer, gospel and evangelism. 

I would recommend this book because it seems to me that Sanders has hit the nail on the head. The Trinity is not a doctrine simply to be believed - even if we could get our head round it - but a life to be lived! Someone once rightly said that without the Trinity there would be no salvation, and the rest just follows on. Sanders begins by reminding us that, whether we realize it or not, we are Trinitarians. He tells the story of how Nicky Cruz (of The Cross and the Switchblade fame) found a new power in his Christian life when he discovered the Trinity. This is Sanders’ explicitly theological chapter. Yet the theology is not dry, but an inspiring resource for our life with God. He complements it with a second chapter drawing on the theology of Susanna Wesley, on how God’s Triune nature is first and foremost ontological: it the way God is, so that, even if there were no human beings or creation, God would still be God, still be Love, and still be Self-Existent. This protects our worship from being man-centered, and our theology from picturing a lonely God who created out of necessity.

He then spends the remainder of the book showing how the great Gospel we wish above all to proclaim is a product of the work of the Trinity. Evangelical salvation, indeed, involves a “tacit Trinitarianism” and, especially with the doctrine of adoption, provides a deeper foundation to the sometimes trite formulations of which we are fond. He shows how discipleship of Jesus is really Trinitarian as it is through the Spirit that we become his followers, and how there is never any need to play Trinitarianism off against Discipleship of Christ as they are one and the same. He explores the writings of Francis Schaeffer to show how spiritual experience is by definition an experience ‘of the Father through the Son by the Spirit’. He finally shows how the true “grain” of prayer is Trinitarian: the promptings of the Spirit are offered to the Father through the mediating prayers of Christ the Intercessor.

I will say it again - I like this book. In vain did I look in the index for “Filioque” or evidence of any of the Trinitarian or Christological heresies with which such books so often abound. There is no playing off of Social Trinity with Augustinian thinking. I have to say the diagrams were not to my taste, not that there are any drawings of the Trinity or indeed any reductionist analogies at all - its just they were not intuitive for me. But the strength of this book lies in its gentle and joyous uncovering of the Trinitarian shape of everything we hold dear, and the challenge to live explicitly Trinitarian lives in short - to “Embrace the Trinity.”