How and when did Jesus and the Spirit come to be regarded as fully God? The Birth of the Trinity offers a new historical approach by exploring the way in which first- and second-century Christians read the Old Testament in order to differentiate the one God as multiple persons. The earliest Christians felt they could metaphorically overhear divine conversations between the Father, Son, and Spirit when reading the Old Testament. When these snatches of dialogue are connected and joined, they form a narrative about the unfolding interior divine life as understood by the nascent church. What emerges is not a static portrait of the triune God, but a developing story of divine persons enacting mutual esteem, voiced praise, collaborative strategy, and self-sacrificial love. The presence of divine dialogue in the New Testament and early Christian literature shows that, contrary to the claims of James Dunn and Bart Ehrman (among others), the earliest Christology was the highest Christology, as Jesus was identified as a divine person through Old Testament interpretation. The result is a Trinitarian biblical and early Christian theology.

This series of meditations on the birth of Christ encourages the reader to relive the miracle of Christmas. Through reflecting on Scripture, Church tradition, and Chinese culture the reader may experience afresh the Word becoming flesh. The reader travels to ancient Bethlehem in a spiritual sense to contemplate the meaning of the incarnation for the past, the future, and the present. As the reader recalls the first coming of Christ into history, he or she may also direct the heart to the future, looking forward to the second coming of Christ at the end of the age, and simultaneously experience his transforming presence in the present. The reader could develop a spiritual formation in the Advent season with the inspirations from the Chinese cultural and wisdom resources.

When I was seeking an employment adequate to the powers of human life and righteous in itself, whether prompted by nature or suggested by the researches of the wise, whereby I might attain to some result worthy of that Divine gift of understanding which has been given us, many things occurred to me which in general esteem were thought to render life both useful and desirable. And especially that which now, as always in the past, is regarded as most to be desired, leisure combined with wealth, came before my mind.

Though trinitarian theology has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the last few years, there is a lamentable lacuna in much of this study, a gap between intellectual rigor and concrete experience. While the contributions of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas are important to any foundational study of the Trinity, a strictly philosophical and scholastic approach has proved to be both contentious and problematic. As a result, many are left wanting for more meaningful expressions of this profound mystery. Anne Hunt fills this lacuna and offers a fresh avenue of reflection. She explores the distinctly trinitarian insights of a number of Christian mystics 'Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart, Bonaventure and Elizabeth of the Trinity, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, William of St. Thierry and Julian of Norwich. Readers will find that the mystery of the divine life and love that was so tangibly given and so palpably experienced by these mystics is now offered to us through them. Anne Hunt is faculty dean of theology and philosophy at Australian Catholic University. She is currently vice president of the Australian Catholic Theological Association. She is author of Trinity: Nexus of the Mysteries of Christian Faith, What Are They Saying About the Trinity? and The Trinity and the Paschal Mystery.