Trinity

"Most Christians, no matter how orthodox or devout they may be, have (through no fault of their own) little notion of how the doctrine of the Trinity took shape, or why it assumed the form it did. Few, certainly, take an interest in the doctrinal disputes of the Church’s early centuries, and many harbor at best some vague conception of the Christian doctrine of God that, if more closely examined, turns out to be either some version of one of the heresies rejected by the councils of the ancient Church—“tritheism,” “adoptionism,” “modalism,” even “Arianism”—or a bland ethical Unitarianism bound only tenuously to the historical career of Jesus of Nazareth. Many, I suspect, think of the doctrine of the Trinity (when they have occasion to think of it at all) either as a mere revealed “fact” susceptible of no rational investigation or as something rather arbitrary and historically fortuitous, to be embraced ex convenientia but accorded little serious reflection. In fact, however, the orthodox articulation of Trinitarian theology came at the end not only of many decades of extremely complicated theological dispute, but also of centuries of meditation upon the meaning of the scriptural account of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and continued presence to the Church in the Holy Spirit."

--David Bentley Hart, "The Lively God of Robert Jenson," First Things October, 2005