In this chapter I shall be asking at one level the most fundamental question about the doctrine of the Trinity possible: why was this doctrine needed at all, and why was God theorized as ‘triune’ in the first place? At another level I shall be probing some connected issues which traditional textbook accounts are more coy about exploring. I shall be asking how questions of spiritual power, desire, and gender were from the outset entangled in this nexus of doctrinal decision. But, as the Prelude has shown, this entanglement will not be read simplistically, as if the emergence of trinitarian ‘orthodoxy’ was by definition nothing but a repressive powerplay, and ‘heresy’ the neglected theological Cinderella intrinsically worthy of new contemporary adulation. The spiritual and theological discernment required here is more complicated than such a stark opposition would suggest.

By the end of the chapter, however, a bold and paradoxical conclusion will emerge from the conjoining of my two levels of analysis. This conclusion is worth stating anticipatorily at the outset, lest the complexity of the biblical and historical materials to be covered obscures the undergirding thesis.