laudable Practice

On 3rd February 1696, William III, Supreme Governor of the Churches of England and Ireland, issued  Directions to our Arch-bishops and Bishops, for the Preserving of Unity in the Church, and the Purity of the Christian faith, concerning the Holy Trinity . Edward Cardwell, in his Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England from 1546 to 1716 (1839), explains the context which led to the issuing of the Directions : In the year 1691, Dr. William Sherlock, soon afterwards appointed to the deanery of St. Paul's, published his "Vindication of the Doctrine of the holy and ever-blessed Trinity," containing a new method of explaining that sacred mystery, and tending in one part of the argument to the establishment of a tritheism. This gave rise to a lengthened controversy, in which Dr. South and himself were the great antagonists, both of them bringing an impetuous temper to the discussion, and calculated to do injury to the cause of religious inquiry by the intemperance ...

Where exactly, one might wonder, did they acquire such a vivid feeling for the inner life of the deity? So said Karen Kilby in her influential paper critiquing social Trinitarianism, ' Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity '. Particularly significant is Kilby's sense that social Trinitarianism is placing too great a burden on Trinitarian teaching, making the doctrine hold and say much more than it can sustain:    I began by noting a concern in recent theology to re-establish the vitality and relevance of the doctrine of the Trinity, and in fact I think it is here that the whole thing actually starts to go wrong. Does the Trinity need to be relevant? What kind of relevance does it need to have? The doctrine of the Trinity arose in order to affirm certain things about the divinity of Christ, and, secondarily, of the Spirit, and it arose against a background assumption that God is one.  So one could say that as long as Christians continue...