Delighting In The Trinity Study Guide

Working Through Delighting In The Trinity Study Guide

I spent about three weeks going through Delighting In The Trinity Study Guide last fall because a friend at church handed it to me and said I should look at it. It’s a question-based curriculum designed for individual or small group use, and honestly, it does what it promises if you approach it the right way. Most people blow through it in a weekend and come out having learned almost nothing, because they treat it like a trivia worksheet instead of a meditation tool. Here’s how I actually got value out of it. The guide is organized around sessions that each focus on a particular aspect of Trinitarian theology — the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, their relationships, and what that means practically. Each session has readings, reflection questions, and discussion prompts. The problem is most people skip the reflection part or answer it in two sentences and move on. That’s not how this works. I kept a separate notebook and actually wrote out my answers instead of just thinking them. The questions are deliberately open-ended, which sounds nice but means your brain will try to give quick shallow answers and check the box. Writing them down forced me to slow up. For example, one session asked about how the doctrine of the Trinity changes the way you pray. I wanted to write something like "it makes prayer better," which is useless. Instead I sat with it and ended up writing a full paragraph about how I'd been approaching prayer as a transactional request line rather than a relational act, and how the Father/Son/Spirit dynamic reframes that.

The readings themselves are dense but accessible. They pull from Augustine, the Cappadocian fathers, and some modern theologians like Greg Boyd and Bruce Ware, which creates some friction in the text itself. I found it useful to just read each session's material twice — once straight through, then again while highlighting passages that confused me. The confusion is often where the learning happens. One edge case I ran into was around session seven, which deals with the filioque clause and the Western versus Eastern understanding of the Spirit's procession. The guide glances at it but doesn't go deep, and I found myself stuck. I couldn't make sense of why this historical disagreement mattered for someone just trying to grow in their faith. I ended up looking up J.N.D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines, chapter nineteen, and reading that alongside the guide's material. It took another forty-five minutes but suddenly everything clicked. The workaround was basically accepting that the guide assumes a certain baseline knowledge and supplementing it when it skips over the harder stuff. Here's what I wish I'd known going in: the discussion questions at the end of each session are actually the most important part, not the readings. The readings give you information. The questions are designed to make you apply it. If you're doing this in a group setting, don't let anyone rush past the questions. I've seen this happen repeatedly where someone who's read ahead dominates the conversation and everyone else ends up passively nodding along. The fix is simple — go around the circle and make everyone answer before opening it up to general discussion. Takes longer but you actually get engagement.

Another thing that tripped me up early on was the assumption that everyone in the guide shares the same theological framework. Some of the language leans noticeably Reformed, and if you're coming from a different tradition, certain passages will feel like they're pushing against your instincts without acknowledging it. That's not necessarily a flaw in the guide itself, but it is something to be aware of. I found it helpful to note those moments and either research the alternative view or discuss it openly with whoever I was studying with. The download format is typically a PDF, and I'd recommend printing it out or using a tablet with a stylus so you can write in the margins. Going through it on a phone screen cuts the experience down significantly because you can't really annotate easily. Also, the guide runs about ten sessions, and I'd suggest doing one per week rather than cramming. The concepts need room to settle. Going faster than that turns it into just another checkbox activity. There are legitimate limitations to this study guide. It doesn't address every theological objection to Trinitarian doctrine. If someone in your group is working through genuine doubts or has been wounded by heavy-handed Trinitarian arguments from their past, this guide isn't structured to meet those needs. It assumes a baseline of orthodox commitment. For that, you'd want something more pastoral like Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology chapters on the Trinity paired with actual counsel, not a study curriculum.

Also, the guide is somewhat dated in its treatment of certain contemporary debates around social Trinitarianism and the work of scholars like Miroslav Volf or Jurgen Moltmann. If your group is theologically curious, you'll probably hit walls where the guide's answers feel incomplete. Again, supplementing with outside reading solves most of this, but it does require extra work on your part. Overall, it's a solid entry point into Trinitarian theology for people who already have some foundation. It won't make a skeptic into a believer, and it won't turn a theology graduate into a pastor. But for someone who wants to understand what they're actually saying when they say "Trinity" and think through what that means for daily life, it gets the job done if you put in the time.