The Trinity: what’s the point?

To be honest, the doctrine of the Trinity is something most Christians treat with a mixture of bafflement and embarrassment.

On the one hand, it is apparently bad maths. When you divide three into one, you don’t have one anymore. What’s that about?

On the other hand, it seems to be strange theology. The Bible is insistently monotheistic from the start. But then we have the New Testament naming Jesus as divine, and then introducing a third person, the holy Spirit. Are there three gods, or one? What’s that about?

I suspect most of us find it simply more manageable to just think of God the Father, and Jesus and the Spirit as something like his agents. Or, to not think about it at all. After all, what difference does it make? Let the theologians fight it out – after all, they have to have something to keep them off Facebook.

English pastor and author Sam Allberry’s new book Connected – Living in the Light of the Trinity’ is designed to help Christians to grasp something of the significance of the Trinity not simply as an abstract concept but in their everyday experience of God. It is, as Allberry insists, a teaching that is eminently practical. How could it not be after all? We are dealing with the very source of life – you would expect there to be all kinds of practical implications. Read more