Thursday, August 19, 2010

The Deep Things

This sounds like a book I will want to read - The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything by Fred Sanders. Andrew Farris did An Interview with Fred Sanders on The Deep Things of God  - excerpts below:
What is the main point of The Deep Things of God?
The main point is that the gospel is trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel. That is, the things that Christians already know and experience as the core of their lives in Christ, those are the things that make the Trinity make sense. I spend time unpacking salvation, Bible study, and prayer to show what’s trinitarian about them.

Who are you hoping will read it?
It’s for evangelical Christians, and I’m hoping to re-introduce them to themselves. This interdenominational movement, this strange family of believers that has named itself after the gospel (the evangel), has been a rich source of trinitarian life and thought. In this book, I call forward as many evangelical witnesses as I can to the deep trinitarianism that has animated the movement. Other Christians, believers who aren’t evangelical Protestants, are welcome to read it as well, but they need to know that they’re listening in to a discussion for evangelicals.

I suspect you get into this in the book, but what are some ways that today’s churches can be more explicitly Trinitarian?
Well, the key word is “explicitly,” because my argument is that we’re already very trinitarian, implicitly. So the first step is to do nothing, just reflect on the trinitarian character of our salvation, our Christian lives, our fellowship. That should give rise to an insight about the character of God as the Father, Son, and Spirit who saves us in this way. From there, I think a whole new dimension of depth opens up that enriches all the things we are already doing. It only takes a little bit of work to sensitize a congregation to the reality of the Trinity, and once they’ve got the clue, they start to see the three persons all around them: passages of Scripture that used to seem to be talking about “God in general” now come alive with trinitarian specificity. A prayer that starts out with a vague calling on “God” is transformed into a prayer to the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. In this book, I really do concentrate on drawing back the curtain and showing what’s already trinitarian about life in the gospel, and I leave out the practical suggestions for how to improve. That may be naive, or I might not be the right person to write the very practical “what to do in church this Sunday” book, but the message to the evangelical church is to be who we are. We’re too trinitarian to let ourselves be un-trinitarian.

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