Book Review:
Delighting in the Trinity

This book review was included in the November 2019 Meadowcroft Monthly. For an archive of all book reviews, click here.

It’s easy to think of the Trinity as a stale, unhelpful doctrine that is simply hard to understand and harder to explain. Michael Reeves has done the church a great service in debunking these myths - Delighting in the Trinity was, in a word, delightful.

Reeves admits that the Trinity has often been taught and understood in a way that sounds “cold and stodgy.” But he also says - “Yes, the Trinity can be presented as a fusty (Reeves is British) and irrelevant dogma, but the truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity.” In light of this, he shows that understanding the Trinity will help us to understand the love of God and allow us to better enjoy him.

Reeves walks through the doctrine of the Trinity by going back to even before creation, when the Trinity existed in perfect love and harmony. He says “A God who is in himself love, who before all things could ‘never be anything but love.’ Having such a God happily changes everything.”

Next, Reeves shows how the good creation we inhabit is the overflow of the love that existed in the Trinity. He does this by contrasting the Christian account of creation with other accounts of creation. This is one of the things that has helped me to appreciate the beauty of Christianity. The other, non-Trinitarian understandings of creation are usually demeaning and sometimes downright gross (I won’t even get into them, this is a family publication.)

In contrast, Reeves says that Jesus is “the blueprint for creation. He is the one eternally loved by the Father; creation is about the extension of that love outward so that it might be enjoyed by others.”

Reeves then moves on to show that both salvation and the Christian life are dependent on the Trinity. In fact, the Trinity even helps us to understand what happened when Adam and Eve fell - “It means something happened deeper than rule-breaking and misbehavior: we perverted love and rejected him, the one who made us to love and be loved by him.”

The book wraps up by summing up the beauty of our triune God, and how much this God conflicts with how we often perceive of God on our own. We need to understand the nature of our triune God, because, “If God is not Father, Son and Spirit, then he is eminently rejectable: without love, radiance or beauty. Who would want such a God to have any power or even to exist? But the triune, living God of the Bible is Beauty. Here is a God we can really want, and whose sovereignty we can wholeheartedly rejoice in.”

One bonus in this book is that there is a helpful graphical representation (see at right) of the Trinity. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s a huge improvement over previous attempts, such as a three-leaf shamrock, etc. It’s called “The Shield of the Trinity” and it simply shows that all three persons of God are, in fact, God, and yet it preserves the distinction between persons. This is a quick, helpful and visual way to begin to explain the Trinity to someone.

This is also an important book because it may help us to talk to our Muslim friends. I have visited a mosque only once - it was during seminary and our missions professor was friends with a local Muslim leader, so we went to one of their midday services. The Muslim leader gave a talk that was clearly directed at us - all about how incorrect the Trinitarian understanding of God was. But, as Reeves points out, the Trinity helps us to challenge the Islamic understanding of God. Reeves says, “Traditionally, Allah is said to have ninety-nine names, titles which describe him as he is in himself in eternity. One of them is ‘The Loving.’ But how could Allah be loving in eternity?” And he’s right! We can only say “God is love” because our God is Trinity.

There is certainly a place for “how-to” books on the Christian life. This is not really one of them. Reeves acknowledges this and reminds us that “Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God. To know and grow to enjoy him is what we are saved for.” At the same time, though, this understanding does in fact end up changing us. “Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving. Sensing the desirability of God alters our preferences and inclinations, the things that drive our behavior: we begin to want God more than anything else.”

Reeves is an outstanding writer - I heartily recommend anything he writes, but this is the best place to start. Oh, and the book is extremely readable and short.