ABSTRACT
The Christian doctrines of Atonement, Christology and the Trinity can be understood as the doctrinal forms in which the matrix of faith has been developed and explained within the Christian tradition. These doctrines were first developed by the early Church Fathers who tried to interpret the faith in terms of the Platonist forms of thought that were current in the Hellenistic world in which they lived and to which they addressed their message. For Christians, then, it is in the cross of Jesus that we come to know the compassionate love of God. Sometimes this claim is extended to assert that it is only through the cross of Jesus that this can be known. Thus for example the commission on faith of the United Church of Canada declared that ‘without the particular knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, men do not really know God at all.’
