The most striking feature of recent British trinitarian theology – at least where England is concerned – is the frankness with which orthodox trinitarianism is being questioned or even rejected. This sceptical note in doctrinal criticism has also been sounded over the doctrine of the Incarnation – not surprisingly, for the two doctrines are, both historically and rationally, linked. Indeed the collapse of trinitarian theology is an inevitable consequence of the abandonment of incarnational Christology. Thus we find, in the writings of two Regius Professors of Divinity, at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Maurice Wiles and Geoffrey Lampe, along with Christological reductionism, a marked tendency towards unitarianism. Neither Wiles nor Lampe can see much future for the doctrine of the Trinity.

It is perfectly true that both scholars are prepared to go on using trinitarian language, and they would certainly unite in rejecting deistic versions of unitarianism whereby God is thought of as remote and isolated from the world. Both would stress the immanence of God in his creation. But neither is prepared to grant much meaning, let alone an essential place in Christian theism, to such classical formulations as that God is to be known and worshipped as three persons in one substance, or even to the looser affirmation that there exist relations of love within God.