A highly creative piece, Andrei Rublev’s Troitsa (Russian for Triune or Trinity) hails from the summit of a more-than-thousand-year-old iconographic tradition. As you might have surmised, it is a Trinitarian interpretation of Gen 18:1-16, the episode in which “three men” visit Abraham and Sarah and promise them a son.

While no Christian would ever formally deny the importance of the Trinity, it is always healthy to question whether this importance has the impact on our daily lives that it should. I once heard the story of a professor of Theology who asked his students: “If I were to tell you today that we have discovered new texts of the bible and of the Fathers of the Church that reveal that our One God is, in reality, two people and not three, how would you react? Would what change in your life?”

If the Holy Trinity is merely an object of abstract theological debate, then such a change would not change your life much. If, however, the Holy Trinity is not simply a concept for us, rather a referral to our living relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, then, in responding to the question, we should be jumping out of our chairs to defend the three People that we know and love!