Tag: trinity

This inner life that God lives, in the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is a livelier life than any other life. We know about it because we have overheard Father, Son, and Holy Spirit talking amongst themselves with the intent that we overhear them and be brought into the conversation. Simply knowing that the life of God in itself is the liveliest of all lives is a medicinal correction to our sick, self-centered thinking….

The crucial thing is that we should rejoice in it. The knowledge that God enjoys perfect blessedness is a great thing. Even if it stays a kind of secret at the back of our minds, as something that we cannot say much about, it nevertheless exerts a tremendous gravitational pull on the rest of our thoughts and affections. Thomas Traherne said, “I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the centre of the earth unseen violently attract it.”

Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 81–82.

Is it too bold of us to declare what God was like, or what he was doing, before creation? It requires boldness, to be sure, but only the boldness of the New Testament.

One of the characteristic differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the New Testament is bold to make such statements. Look, for instance, at the way the New Testament takes a step further back with its declaration of salvation: where God declares in the old covenant, “I have chosen you,” the new covenant announces that “he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.”

The prophets do not make declarations about what happened “before the foundation of the world,” but the apostles do.

Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 63.

…When we lose our ability to see the Trinity as directly connected to the gospel, we tend to reduce it to an issue of authority and mental obedience. No wonder, then, that the doctrine of the Trinity has been treated as something of a burden by many evangelicals.

But this dysfunction of the doctrine is only one side of the story of evangelical Trinitarianism. The other side of the story is that the life of every healthy church and every true Christian is a manifestation of the work of the Trinity. Evangelicalism, even when it is handling the doctrine of the Trinity as a foreign artifact difficult to deal with, is nevertheless always already immersed in the rich, Trinitarian reality of the gospel.

We are often in the strange position of being Trinitarian without knowing it, or of living in an encounter with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that we then give very weak and inadequate explanations of. We have the thing itself but act as if we do not know we have it.

Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 44.