Three in One: Analogies for the Trinity by William David Spencer is from Kregel Academic Publishers. A softcover, it weighs in at 216 pages counting the appendices and excluding the indices. Black and white printing throughout, this is a text-priority book, not one filled with pictures or diagrams.
Overall, the thrust in Three in One is to look at how Christians communicate the truth of the Trinity. While Spencer is not out to prove the Trinity, he does open the book with background on this theological point. After all, why examine analogies for the Trinity if there isn't one?
That particular detail addressed--and it is illustrative, if not comprehensive--Spencer moves on to define the intentions of this work. The goals here are to express if it is appropriate to use language to explain the Trinity and, if so, what to say. One can easily assume his point will be that language is appropriate, otherwise, it's a pamphlet, not a book.
The next steps taken are to examine various analogies and explanations of the Trinity. Spencer takes the time to explain them well, then goes forward to show the shortcomings in many analogies but also notes how they still help us see and understand God better.
Overall, I find his conclusions helpful about the use of language to explain the realities of God. Further, his summaries of various well-known analogies for the Trinity are easy to grasp.
The subtitle of "Analogies for the Trinity" may be a bit off, as it is really more of an examination of the use of analogy than it is suggested analogies. Still, that's minor quibbling. I found Spencer's work to be helpful in expressing the inexpressible truth.
And, of course, he references this:
No comments:
Post a Comment
To deal with SPAM comments, all comments are moderated. I'm typically willing to post contrary views...but I also only check the list once a day, so if you posted within the last 24 hours, I may not be to it yet.