Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 2017, Vol. 10, No. 2, 358-362 Copyright 2017 by Institute for Spiritual Formation Biola University, 1939-7909 Spir it u a l F ormation in the T r in it y : A R eview E ssay of D onald F airbairn ’s L if e in the Tr in it y F red Sanders Biola University (La Mirada, CA) As I was rearranging some shelves recently, I was struck by the fact that my books on spiritual formation occupy a peculiar region. They live somewhere toward the end of the whole theological collection, after the books on Christology and pneumatology and ecclesiology; in fact they’re about as far from the books about God and Christ as you can get. They’re somewhere between ethics and eschatology. In the Library of Congress classification system, they’re around BX4511. That’s what we used to call practical theology, and it’s a region of books more or less dominated by studies of technique. I know there’s nothing metaphysically prescriptive about book orga- nizing. Books that are intimately near to each other in spirit can be physi- cally far from each other on the shelf. But the reason my attention was drawn to the strange loneliness of my spiritual formation books at the end of the shelf is that their distant placement did in fact strike me as the out- ward sign of an inward reality. Here is the problem: Spiritual formation is, or ought to be, all about the change that comes about in people when they encounter the true and living God in deep and transformative ways. The subject of God should loom very large in the field of formation. As A. W. Tozer famously wrote in The Knowledge of the Holy, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” To say the same thing in more Trinitarian idiom, the person and work of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, are theological subjects without which spiritual formation is impos- sible. What are we to read if we want to think great thoughts of God and to be intentional about spiritual formation simultaneously? There are a number of writers who manage to do theological reflection with enough scope to take in both poles at once. Some books succeed at this task so well that they actually resist being shelved at either end of the spectrum. In my estimation, one such volume from the past decade is Don- ald Fairbairn’s 2009 book Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology 358