This book is written in the fundamental conviction that no cogent answer to the contemporary Christian question of the trinitarian God can be given without charting the necessary and intrinsic entanglement of human sexuality and spirituality in such a quest: the questions of right contemplation of God, right speech about God, and right ordering of desire all hang together. They emerge in primary interaction with Scripture, become intensified and contested in early Christian tradition, and are purified in the crucible of prayer. Thus the problem of the Trinity cannot be solved without addressing the very questions that seem least to do with it, questions which press on the contemporary Christian churches with such devastating and often destructive force: questions of sexual justice, questions of the meaning and stability of gender roles, questions of the final theological significance of sexual desire…

Some of the most significant figures in the historical development of the doctrine of the Trinity (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, especially) feature large in this volume because of the fascinatingly different ways in which they relate their perceptions of intense desire for God, their often problematic feelings about sexual desire at the human level, and their newly creative understandings of God as Trinity.

• Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’