The evangelical blog world is all atwitter (pun intended) with excitement about Fred Sanders‘ new book, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.  My copy is on the way and I for one can’t wait to read (and review) it.  In the mean time, I’ve satiated my trinitarian thirst with an interview with Dr. Sanders.

Fred Sanders is an associate professor of theology at Biola University in the Torrey Honors Institute.  He has also edited Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective and written a number of journal articles (most recently this one) on the subject.  Dr. Sanders also blogs at Scriptorium Daily (along with others from the Torrey faculty at Biola), which I really could not recommend much higher.

So without further ado…

How did you first become interested in focusing theologically on the Trinity?

I have some pride of ownership, because I invented the Trinity all by myself. That is, as a young convert to Christianity, I was working through the New Testament and came to the conclusion that none of this made sense unless the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were God. I remember quite distinctly how the first chapter of Ephesians, with its grand overview of salvation, forced this conclusion on me. I was about 16 or 17, and I actually got worried that I had created a heresy that would exclude me from normal churches. Imagine my relief when I started rifling through CS Lewis, JI Packer, and Francis Schaeffer, to discover that this was something that was old news indeed. Later I had the chance to work my way through lots of church fathers, and was thrilled to see how the early church had taken up the writings of the New Testament and come to the same conclusions, though with much greater competence.

What is the main point of The Deep Things of God?

The main point is that the gospel is trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel. That is, the things that Christians already know and experience as the core of their lives in Christ, those are the things that make the Trinity make sense. I spend time unpacking salvation, Bible study, and prayer to show what’s trinitarian about them.

Who are you hoping will read it?

It’s for evangelical Christians, and I’m hoping to re-introduce them to themselves. This interdenominational movement, this strange family of believers that has named itself after the gospel (the evangel), has been a rich source of trinitarian life and thought. In this book, I call forward as many evangelical witnesses as I can to the deep trinitarianism that has animated the movement. Other Christians, believers who aren’t evangelical Protestants, are welcome to read it as well, but they need to know that they’re listening in to a discussion for evangelicals.

I suspect you get into this in the book, but what are some ways that today’s churches can be more explicitly Trinitarian?

Well, the key word is “explicitly,” because my argument is that we’re already very trinitarian, implicitly. So the first step is to do nothing, just reflect on the trinitarian character of our salvation, our Christian lives, our fellowship. That should give rise to an insight about the character of God as the Father, Son, and Spirit who saves us in this way. From there, I think a whole new dimension of depth opens up that enriches all the things we are already doing. It only takes a little bit of work to sensitize a congregation to the reality of the Trinity, and once they’ve got the clue, they start to see the three persons all around them: passages of Scripture that used to seem to be talking about “God in general” now come alive with trinitarian specificity. A prayer that starts out with a vague calling on “God” is transformed into a prayer to the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. In this book, I really do concentrate on drawing back the curtain and showing what’s already trinitarian about life in the gospel, and I leave out the practical suggestions for how to improve. That may be naive, or I might not be the right person to write the very practical “what to do in church this Sunday” book, but the message to the evangelical church is to be who we are. We’re too trinitarian to let ourselves be un-trinitarian.

If someone reads your book and decides s/he wants to read more about the Trinity, can you recommend a few places to turn?

What you’ll find in the Deep Things of God is that you probably already have some of the best writing about the Trinity on your shelves already: Book IV of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity; Francis Schaeffer’s True Spirituality; and the “He Shall Testify” chapter of J.I. Packer’s Knowing God.  Not to mention Calvin’s Institutes (Book I chapter 13) and Wesley’s hymns.

If you’re ready for a biggish book that takes a few steps beyond that, I like Robert Letham’s book The Holy Trinity in Scripture, History, and Theology. It’s got pointers in it that get you back into the older sources, especially the church fathers.

A few years ago, I did a short annotated list. It needs a little updating, but I still stand by it.

Thanks for your time, Dr. Sanders!