Weekly Sampler Platter: Saturday, February 21, 2015

Here's a sampling of some of the things I've been reading and reviewing this week.  The hope is that these bite-sized sections of books, articles, blog posts, etc will stand on their own and be beneficial (or at least thought-provoking!) in-and-of-themselves.  But I also hope that some of you will like these excerpts enough that they pull you into the larger work from which they've been taken.

Let's start sampling: 

---

Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.  Crossway, 2010.  p. 62:

"The doctrine of the Trinity is first and foremost a teaching about who God is, and God the Trinity would have been God the Trinity whether he had revealed himself to us or not, whether he had redeemed us or not, whether he had created us or not."

---

Augustine, De Trinitate.  Book 1.3.5:

“…in no other subject [than the Trinity] is error more dangerous, or inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable.”

---

Stephen R. Holmes in Two Views on the Trinity, ed. by Jason S. Sexton.  Zondervan, 2013.  p. 31

“…it would be wrong to suppose that trinitarian thought was a fourth-century novelty.  Instead, I would argue that the worship of the church had been fairly consistently trinitarian, or “proto-trinitarian,” from the earliest days of Christianity.  The fourth century developments were theological formulations that were adequate to making sense of how what was said and assumed in worship could properly be said/assumed.  The ecumenical doctrine established by the Council of Constantinople, then, and developed by Augustine is a successful attempt to state theologically the things the church had always tacitly assumed in their worship.”