The time is right, apparently, for a rebirth of trinitarian theology in the West. From the Enlightenment until the mid-twentieth century, the doctrine had been largely left for dead; those who continued to affirm it often did so in merely formulaic ways, which did little to help anyone understand its significance. Nevertheless, while the doctrine has all too rarely been explicated in adequate ways, its claims have remained present – in ordinary Christian practice, in the European intellectual milieu, and even in the very air that was breathed in the (ostensibly antitrinitarian) Enlightenment. Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued that ‘the Doctrine of the Trinity <…> has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding’.

So the soil was already fertile as the seeds of trinitarian theology were resown in the early twentieth century, by theologians such as Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. These seeds are now producing a bumper-crop of thoughtful reflection on the Christian doctrine of God – much of it very good fruit (though not without the occasional weed). The renaissance of trinitarian theology also owes a great deal to the East: to the early Greek fathers, to the ongoing Orthodox tradition, and – in general – to a region of theological discourse within which the doctrine did not fade from view (as it had in the West).