Welcome to Things Unseen Today, and especially welcome if you're new to our podcast.

This week we've been thinking about what is surely one of the profoundest elements,

if not the profoundest element in the Christian faith, the Trinity.

I love the saying of Augustine that no doctrine is more difficult or more dangerous than the

doctrine of the Trinity, and yet at the same time no doctrine is more rewarding.

I hope we can't just a glimpse of that yesterday when we were thinking about the fact that God is love,

and being love is Trinity and that these two truths mesh together beautifully.

But, you know, there's a very obvious reason why we should be more

tunitarian in our thinking than I suspect we actually are, and perhaps it's also the most

obvious reason for saying that far from being speculative and impractical, as people often say,

the doctrine of the Trinity must actually be the most basic and the most profoundly practical

of all doctrines. The reasons actually so obvious that we rarely notice it,

and sometimes we tend to obscure it or divert people away from it. I want to be in

guess what I'm thinking about. I'm actually thinking about baptism. It's something that all Christians

have in common. I'm not thinking here about the elements that Christians tend to debate together.

Who should be baptized and how we should baptize? I'm talking about the words that we all use

at a baptism. I baptize you in the name singular of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

the words that go back to Jesus' great commission in Matthew 28.

I think it's wonderful to remember that this was actually the first time, if I can put it this way,

that the full name of God was ever pronounced. We're baptized into this one name of God,

but it's pronounced Father and Son and Holy Spirit, so that right from the beginning of the Christian

life, you and I are called to live and fellowship with the Trinity. The Trinity is the bedrock of the

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