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These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology

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Cunningham's scope in These Three Are One is breathtaking. He covers thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Wittgenstein and Toni Morrison. He shows the Trinity to be pivotal to our understanding of issues as diverse as sexuality, parenting and worship space. Yet despite the breadth, depth does not suffer - and there is a lightness of touch that should please both non-specialists and specialists alike. I suppose Cunningham's all-inclusive outlook makes perfect sense in a book which aims to show the doctrine of the Trinity to be "the central claim of the (Christian) faith, in which all other elements find their center".

While I am not a theologian myself I picked up this book and found myself immersed in the controversies behind the mysterious idea of the Trinity. In the Bible the Trinity is revealed, but it was apparently the early Christian fathers who elaborated on the sketchy, elemental Triune of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" that we learned as children. And just as children ask puzzledly, "How can three different people be the same?" their older friends and counsellors are also still puzzled on how best to understand what seems on the one hand as a lovely metaphor for relationality, but to others with a more fundamental view, it is an actual fact of the universe.

Cunningham notes that many of nature's little miracles seem to draw their inspiration from the three-pronged trident that is the Trinity. When John Donne prayed, "Batter my heart, three-personed God," he was bringing a metaphysical twist in to what had been heatedly argued over in Renaissance days. THESE THREE is similarly divided into three parts, and no one would say that the three parts resemble each other in any way.