Trinity Guide to the Trinity

""From early on we are told that the Trinity is a mystery,"" writes La Due, a London librarian and Catholic commentator. ""We were not expected to understand it, but simply to believe it."" This volume goes a long way toward helping Christians understand the history of the doctrine of the Trinity. La Due opens with biblical sections that relate how scholars such as Walter Brueggeman, Gerhard von Rad and Karl Rahner have traced the evolution of the Trinity in Scripture. La Due then includes helpful historical chapters that highlight how the idea of the Trinity developed in the writings of church fathers such as Irenaeus, Origen and Athanasius, and was codified as doctrine in councils through the Middle Ages and the Reformation. In an unusual twist, La Due includes a chapter on the trinitarian contributions of the Romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and other 19th-century thinkers, and also brings the discussion up to the present with a chapter on how the Trinity has been discussed by liberation, feminist and process theologians. La Due's historical overview, though brief, is a useful digest of the major voices and movements in trinitarian theology. (Feb.)