Native Pilgrim Blog
A couple of weeks ago, Jared Wilson shared his view of what is missing in Christian publishing:
We need prose that sings. We need writers who aren’t merely authorities in their areas and can relay information to us in competent ways . . . We need writers who receive on literary frequencies, writers who feel what they write, who convey poetry or beauty or some ecstatic sense in their writing. We need writers whose work emanates off the page the hum and buzz of adoration.
Fred Sanders is such a writer and his new book, The Deep Things of God, soars. Here are a couple of reasons why. First, not many writers could move from a story about one’s uncle, to the Council of Nicaea, to the epistemological theory of Michael Polanyi (don’t let that last bit scare you off!) in a page and a half, but Sanders’ talent for explanation and his natural wit allow him to do it with ease. When folks envision a book about the Trinity, this is not the dry, dusty tome some might expect. Second, The Deep Things of God is not merely for academics, but fellow worshipers. Sanders’ exultation over his subject, the Triune God, beckons you to join him in worship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And you can’t ask much more from a book about the Trinity than that.
Dr. Sanders was very gracious to take some time to answer some questions about his new book.
MJD: What would you say to the person who sees your book and says, “Oh, great. A book about the Trinity, and with the title The Deep Things of God no less. I’m confused enough as it is”?
Fred Sanders: I sympathize with their exasperation. Just saying the word “Trinity” can be a conversation stopper, because it sounds so lofty, abstract, hoary, Latin, mathematical, and extra-biblical. In fact, the reason I wrote The Deep Things of God is to find a way around those forbidding connotations. So I start out with very familiar and everyday realities of the Christian faith (salvation, prayer, Bible study, fellowship), and work forward to the Trinity. If it works the way I intend it to, this book will have you thinking well about the Trinity before you even know that it’s happening.
As a theology teacher, a lot of my work is to be a Trinity salesman. I am trying to convince conservative evangelical Protestants to buy this doctrine, to buy the whole thing, and to be fully committed to it. To persuade them, I start with things evangelicals already value, and show them how those things are connected to the Trinity.
MJD: The burden of your book is to awaken evangelicals to what they know about the Trinity, so that they will know what they already know; what you call evangelicals’ “Tacit Trinitarianism.” What is “Tacit Trinitarianism” and why is it not enough?
Fred Sanders: “Know what they already know” is a good way to put it. The basic idea is that anybody who has experienced the gospel and is living in fellowship with God is already living in the midst of a trinitarian reality. There’s no other way to account for the Christian life than to give a trinitarian account. For instance, to say that you’re saved is to say that the Father has adopted you as a son in the image of his only begotten Son, and has sent the Spirit of the Son into your heart. To pray to God is to come to the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. So these living realities of the Father, Son, and Spirit are already surrounding us as Christians. When we begin to understand them accurately, we begin to understand the Trinity. First comes the reality, then comes the understanding of it. A lot of teaching about the Trinity can be dull and abstract because, even though it’s true, it takes words and concepts as its starting point, and then gestures towards the reality. The right way to teach the Trinity is to start by attending to the trinitarian reality we are already immersed in before we start to understand its depth.
I call that reality our tacit Trinitarianism, tacit meaning unspoken or unexpressed. When a person first comes to know God in Christ, they are already trinitarian without necessarily being able to express it. As they grow in their spiritual experience and, above all, in their understanding of Scripture, they ought to become articulate about it. Tacit trinitarianism is a rich, fertile ground, and it ought to bring forth understanding. If it doesn’t, something has gone wrong. You can get into a lot of trouble if you know something, but don’t know that you know it. You can stay lost for a long time, driving around the same landmarks but never assembling the big mental map that would get you home. I think the doctrine of the Trinity is that big mental map that locates all the doctrinal landmarks and shows how they go together.
MJD: Why do you think there is such a disconnect between the “Tacit Trinitarianism” that richly underlies evangelical practice and the way evangelicals usually go about thinking about the Trinity?
Fred Sanders: That’s a real puzzle to me. As I say in the book, “we’re too trinitarian to be so untrinitarian.” That is, our experience of the triune God is too rich for our doctrinal expression of it to be so poor. There are probably a lot of contributing factors, but the one I point to is the evangelical genius for simplification and proper emphasis. If you give an evangelical seven important ideas, the first thing they’ll want to know is which one is most important, which one is to be emphasized. It’s not that evangelicals intend to discard the other six ideas –that would be the liberal maneuver. It’s just that they intend to emphasize one point.
So if you’ve got the gospel and the Trinity on the table, evangelicals will always emphasize the gospel. Now here’s the tricky bit. They’re right to do that. The gospel is the part to emphasize. But the Trinity has to still be there, as the massive, controlling, un-emphasized part that gives weight and significance to the emphasized part. When that goes well, as it has for most of evangelical history, it’s beautiful. When it goes wrong, evangelicals try to do more and more with less and less, and an attempt to emphasize the gospel without the weight of the Trinity behind it becomes increasingly shrill and reductionist.
It’s not a matter of choosing between the Trinity and the gospel. On the contrary, you can’t have one without the other. No Trinity, no gospel. How’s that for a kludgy bumper sticker?
MJD: Hence your saying, “the Trinity is the gospel.” So what do you mean by that?
Fred Sanders: When I say the Trinity is the gospel, I mean that the Father sent the Son to redeem us, and the Spirit of the Son to adopt us (Galatians 4:4-6). When we hear about the Trinity, we should think first and foremost about that event, that history, that saving action that God performed for us. It’s pretty sad when Christians hear the word “Trinity” and the dominant idea in their mind is some kind of abstract analogy about shamrocks or the three states of matter. I think the early church pondered its way to the doctrine of the Trinity by figuring out how to condense the whole gospel story into the shortest form. That form is the name that Jesus gave us: the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, into which we are baptized.
In one important sense, which I spend a whole chapter on, the Trinity is bigger than the gospel. The Trinity is who God is, and who God would have been whether there had been creation and redemption or not. The gospel is about aligning us fallen creatures with God, but the doctrine of the Trinity says something about who God himself is. There is an eternal depth of perfection in God that is the source of all the good things he does. That’s the real “deep” thing that the title of the book refers to, following 1 Corinthians 2:10.
MJD: Modern evangelicals don’t have a good reputation for grasping hold of “deep.” What do you see as the dangers that lurk ahead for the movement if shallowness continues to win the day?
Fred Sanders: Shallowness is a besetting problem for the movement. The strong name of the Trinity is the solution. It calls us out into the depths. We are in danger of remaining immature long after the time has come for us to move on to maturity and articulateness. That’s a real spiritual danger, not merely a doctrinal issue. But the doctrinal issue is also important: the fastest-growing varieties of anti-trinitarianism out there are spreading among the low-church, Bible-based evangelical cultures. The offshoot called “Oneness Pentecostalism,” which thinks of Jesus Christ as being the Father, Son and Spirit in person, seems to be growing, and Christians are less and less able to comprehend why that is a problem.
MJD: Do you see the renewed evangelical emphasis on “Gospel-centeredness” and “Christ-centeredness” in competition with a healthy Trinitarianism or a partner?
Fred Sanders: Gospel-centeredness and healthy Trinitarianism are absolutely partners. If they ever appear to be in competition, it’s because one of them has been radically mis-defined or misunderstood. The two have gone hand in hand for most of the history of evangelicalism, as I show in the book: I call witnesses from Calvin to Susanna Wesley to Charles Spurgeon to A.B. Simpson to Oswald Chambers to The Fundamentals to J.I. Packer to Amanda Smith to John Owen to Nicky Cruz, and they all say the same thing: gospel and Trinity go together. If we are losing our grip on how these two go together, it’s a very recent loss, a matter of decades rather than centuries. There is time to recover and there are resources everywhere you look.
MJD: How do you hope someone might be affected by reading your book?
Fred Sanders: I want evangelicals to get the doctrine right and to fall into step theologically. I would hope every reader of this book can get an A on the theology test. But beyond that, I’m praying for the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine itself, to be a means of grace by which people experience deeper communion with the living God. Theology can be that.
