Robert Jenson says “It was the great single dogma of late Mediterranean antiquity’s religion and irreligion, that no story can be ‘really’ true of God, that deity equals ‘impassibility.’ It is not merely that the gospel tells a story about the object of worship; every religion of antiquity did that. The gospel identifies God as ‘He who brought Israel from Egypt and our Lord Jesus from the dead.’ Therefore the gospel cannot rescind from its story at any depth whatsoever of experience, mystical penetration or theologia . Developed trinitarian liturgy and theology appeared as the church maintained the gospel’s identification of God in the very teeth of what everybody knew to be of course and obviously true of God, and in every nook of practice or theory where uncircumcised theological self-evidency lurked.”

Trinitarian theology, Jenson says, is called “to maintain against all compunctions that the biblical story about God and us is true of and for God Himself.”