The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Trinity: Fred Sanders, Matthew Barrett, and the Dangers of Conflation

This is a series of conversations between major theologians and Matthew Barrett on the doctrine of the Trinity.

In this episode, Fred Sanders and Matthew Barrett discuss chapter 4 of Barrett’s book, Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit (Baker, 2021). Sanders and Barrett explore the way the missions reveal the processions of the Trinity, and also share wisdom on how to avoid approaching the Trinity like rationalists or pietists. Sanders and Barrett also have something to say about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the tendency to conflate the immanent life of God with the economy of salvation, creating a Trinity in our own image.

Fred Sanders is a systematic theologian who studies and teaches across the entire range of classic Christian doctrine, but with a special focus on the doctrine of the Trinity. He has taught in the Torrey Honors Institute since 1999, and is an amateur historian of Biola’s institutional history. He is the author of The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything (Crossway, 2017).

Matthew Barrett is the author of Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Baker, 2021). He is the founder and executive editor of Credo Magazine and host of the Credo podcast. He is associate professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.