Traces Of The Trinity

As the Triune God created the world, so creation bears the signs of its Creator. This evocative book by an influential Christian thinker explores the pattern of mutual indwelling that characterizes the creation at every level. Traces of the Trinity appear in myriad ways in everyday life, from our relations with the world and our relationships with others to sexuality, time, language, music, ethics, and logic. This small book with a big idea--the Trinity as the Christian theory of everything--changes the way we view and think about the world and places demands on the way we live together in community.

The essential argument of this new work by Andrew Robinson is that we live, move and have our being within a sea of signs, but that we are largely unaware of this for most of the time. When the structure of these signs is analysed it turns out to rest onthree recurring 'elemental grounds', which the author calls Quality, Otherness and Mediation. The kaleidoscopic, ramifying patterns of Quality, Otherness and Meditation which underpin representations and interpretations at every level and dimension of the processes of signification offer a model of the dynamic mutual indwelling of the Father, Son and Spirit within the eternal life of the Trinity. This 'semiotic model' of the Trinity would be of rather limited interest in itself unless it can also illuminate other areas of Christian theology. Robinson suggests that the model leads to a helpful way of understanding how the entirely human person Jesus of Nazareth may be understood to have been the full and perfect embodiment (representation) of the quality of God's being. This in turn helps us to understand how the processes of representation and interpretation enable us to be drawn into the very life of God. This has practical implications for the church and for the individual lives of Christian believers.It also offers, via a re-articulation of the neglected concept of vestiges of the Trinity in creation, a form of 'spirituality of the everyday'.

This book provides a demonstration that the difficult notion of the Trinity is alive and well, although not in places that one may have expected. It flourishes in a mythology recovered from an ancient pagan past and, surprisingly, in secular poetry and drama of our own time, even though it is often neglected in popular piety and in academic theology.

Paul C. H. Lim offers an insightful examination of the polemical debates about the doctrine of the Trinity in seventeenth-century England, showing that this philosophical and theological re-configuration significantly impacted the politics of religion in the early modern period. Through analysis of these heated polemics, Lim shows how Trinitarian God-Talk became untenable in many ecclesiastical and philosophical circles, which led to the emergence of Unitarianism. He also demonstrates that those who continued to embrace Trinitarian doctrine articulated their piety and theological perspectives in an increasingly secularized culture of discourse. Drawing on both unexplored manuscripts and well-known treatises of Continental and English provenance, he unearths the complex layers of the polemic: from biblical exegesis to reception history of patristic authorities, from popular religious radicalism during the Civil War to Puritan spirituality, from Continental Socinians to English anti-trinitarians who avowed their relative independent theological identity, from the notion of the Platonic captivity of primitive Christianity to that of Plato as "Moses Atticus." Among this book's surprising conclusions are the findings that Anti-Trinitarian sentiment arose from a Puritan ambience, in which Biblical literalism overcame rationalistic presuppositions, and that theology and philosophy were not as unconnected during this period as previously thought. Mystery Unveiled will fill a significant lacuna in early modern English intellectual history.

"Delicately weaves generations of women to the lasting wounds of nuclear destruction and the hubris of war. A unique and unforgettable novel." —Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Woman of Light A literary thriller about the effects of nuclear power on the mind, body, and recorded history of three generations of Japanese women. Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, Japan is preparing for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. An unnamed narrator wakes up in a cold, sterile room, unable to recall her past. Across the country, the elderly begin to hear voices emanating from black stones, compelling them to behave in strange and unpredictable ways. The voices are a symptom of a disease called “Trinity.” As details about the disease come to light, we encounter a thread of linked histories—Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, the discovery of radiation, the nuclear arms race, the subsequent birth of nuclear energy, and the disaster in Fukushima. The thread linking these events begins to unravel in the lead-up to a terrorist attack at the Japan National Olympic Stadium. A work of speculative fiction reckoning with the consequences of the past and continued effects of nuclear power, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity follows the lives of three generations of women as they grapple with the legacy of mankind's quest for light and power.

Who is the God of the Bible? From both within the church and outside her walls the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity, declared in Scripture and passed down in ecumenical creeds and local confessions of faith, is under attack. The emerging absence of a Trinitarian mind-set so prevalent in the church today has enormous implications for the future of the Christian faith. Concerned to counter contemporary attacks on the doctrine of God, Peter Toon here demonstrates the existence and priority of a Trinitarian pattern in Scripture and defends the essential role of the Trinity in Christian belief, faith, and practice.

This study begins with an examination of Girolamo Zanchi's De Tribus Elohim (1572), setting this important defense of the doctrine of the Trinity in the immediate context of the recent rise of antitrinitarianism within the Reformed Palatinate. De Tribus Elohim focused on the grammatical peculiarity of the Hebrew word Elohim (God) in order to refute the biblicism of its contemporary antitrinitarians. In doing so, Zanchi's argument followed an exegetical thread common within the late medieval case for the doctrine of the Trinity, but which ran contrary to the exegetical sensibilities of many of Zanchi's own Reformed colleagues. This disagreement over the correct interpretation of the word Elohim, then became a touchstone for distinguishing between two different approaches to the Hebrew text with the Reformed Church of the late sixteenth century, and becomes a significant piece in understanding the development of Reformed exegesis.

The Failure of Denominationalism and the Future of Christian Unity One of the unforeseen results of the Reformation was the shattering fragmentation of the church. Protestant tribalism was and continues to be a major hindrance to any solution to Christian division and its cultural effects. In this book, influential thinker Peter Leithart critiques American denominationalism in the context of global and historic Christianity, calls for an end to Protestant tribalism, and presents a vision for the future church that transcends post-Reformation divisions. Leithart offers pastors and churches a practical agenda, backed by theological arguments, for pursuing local unity now. Unity in the church will not be a matter of drawing all churches into a single, existing denomination, says Leithart. Returning to Catholicism or Orthodoxy is not the solution. But it is possible to move toward church unity without giving up our convictions about truth. This critique and defense of Protestantism urges readers to preserve and celebrate the central truths recovered in the Reformation while working to heal the wounds of the body of Christ.