I personally believe 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.

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful (and other essays), 5

The great philosopher’s comment — near the outset of his classic essay in aesthetics, “The Relevance of the Beautiful” — hints at the challenge of articulating in a theological/philosophical register something which can only truly be “understood” through being loved, through being worshipped. Here I want to draw attention to a few of the features of my previous articulation of — not the doctrine of Trinity exactly, but its raison d’être.

1. The articulation of this doctrine is an exercise in biblical interpretation. To be specific, this exercise requires, and presupposes, a kind of theological interpretation of a) the Scriptures of Israel, b) the New Testament, and c) the two Testaments together.
2. It thus presupposes — even as it inevitably influences — an account of interpretation, viz., an understanding of hermeneutics, which (in order to be adequate for the task) must be philosophically informed.
3. It also presupposes an account of how the Testaments relate to one another; which is to say it presupposes an account of history — and an adequate account of history must be, well, historically informed.
4. Furthermore, it presupposes an understanding of creation, as what the Creator is not. Yet that creation is capable of decisively receiving the Creator’s divine nature in the Incarnation of the Eternal Son; thus, the account of nature and creation must itself be Christologically informed.
5. Finally, it presupposes an account of the church: the community that identifies itself as called by the Father of Jesus Christ, its members sharing in his eternal inheritance through adoption and experiencing (subjectively and objectively) the presence of his life-giving Spirit, and worshipping the Three in — as — One accordingly. (Not to mention: the church has sought to say some authoritative things about the Three-as-One from time to time.)

At least these five factors, as one constructs them, will impinge upon the particular shape and articulation of one’s Trinitarian construction: a two-Testament approach to biblical interpretation; a philosophically informed hermeneutics; a sense of the biblical relation to history; a Christologically informed account of nature and creation; an understanding of the church and its worship. I am certain there are more. (I have not even mentioned where most Protestant theology has begun the task since the sixteenth century: the doctrine of revelation!) But the complexity of the task suggests that the particularities of the doctrine will thus inevitably be, in a sense and to a degree, contingent.