Tom Smail has written a theologically nuanced account of humanity viewed from the perspective of the triune God in whose image we are made. What Smail manages to do quite admirably is to argue that God's self-revelation in Christ as perfected by the Spirit is that which gives us our cues as to the shape of genuine human existence – ‘what you say about the image depends on what you know about the original’ (p. 2). What results is a dogmatic description of how the activity of Father, Son and Spirit in the revelatory economy funds a true picture of the shape of human existence as ‘free to be initiating’ in accordance with the image of the Father, ‘responsive to the claims of others’ in accordance with the image of the Son and liberated for ‘dynamic creativity’ in accordance with the image of the Spirit (p. 200).

Eschewing projectionist understandings of God, Smail paints a portrait of God ‘as a community of autonomous but totally interdependent persons in relationship’ (p. 78). God is thus a tripersonal reality, one in whose life exists ‘the presence of an authentic personal other’ (p. 85). For Smail, only such a doctrine of God has the theological resources necessary to combat an individualistic anthropology and ecclesiology. In the process of articulating such a doctrine of God, Smail, following Colin Gunton's reading of Augustine and Barth, offers an account of what he thinks is wrong with the Western tradition's doctrine of God, namely, the eclipsing of the person and work of the Spirit. While one could certainly take issue with his rather uncritical appropriation of Gunton's reading of Augustine, and his recourse to the well-trodden but largely unfounded criticism that Barth's pneumatology compromises the hypostatic reality of the Spirit, his instincts are, for the most part, sound, inasmuch as he accounts for the trinitarian persons ‘as three sources of free personal action in rich relationships with one another’ (p. 93). Only when God's being is acknowledged as consisting in personal communion, contends Smail, a communion of those ‘who have their distinctive being and function always within and never outside their relations to each other’, can a trinitarian anthropology and ecclesiology indeed arise (p. 102).

Perhaps what is most stimulating in Smail's proposal is how the Father's action, with respect to Son and Spirit, encourages human beings to forsake egocentricity for the sake of ‘their created exocentricity’, patterned as it is after the Father's, and thus to strive to help set others free, thereby mirroring the Father's ‘liberating love’ (pp. 168, 167). Similarly, creative work is also done with respect to the Spirit's activity and what it might mean for humans to reflect the image of the Spirit in everyday existence. Specifically, Smail stresses that ‘through the Spirit's perfecting creativity, things that already exist become what they were made and meant to be’ (p. 186). The unique activity of each of the trinitarian persons in the economy of salvation enables Smail to articulate a robust account of the extent to which humanity, formed by the essence and work of the Holy Trinity, is really humanity.

Students of Christian doctrine will be hard pressed to find a more probing text written on theological anthropology since Ray S. Anderson's classic work, On Being Human. Moreover, Smail has certainly learned from Barth that to understand and to account for humanity in isolation from the self-revealing God of the Gospel will be to the detriment of humanity. Smail's overriding motif – namely, that humans are fashioned in the image of the triune God and made for perichoretic participation with him – succeeds, precisely because it is supported by a rich description of the Father as initiator, the Son in his humanity as the true human who freely responds to the Father thereby renewing humanity and the Spirit whose creative work restores and completes what has been marred by sin. That said, I wonder if Smail's proposals could not have succeeded even more if he had made use of the language of correspondence or witness. Deployment of these categories might have complemented and therewith lessened the theological work that participation language undertakes in his account. While witness to and participation in the life of the triune God are by no means mutually exclusive theological ideas, it would seem that the former is necessary in order to safeguard the integrity of the human being as participant in her humanity in the life of the triune God. Smail's heavy appropriation of the language of social trinitarianism eclipses, to a degree, an important motif which is also an ingredient in a trinitarian account of the human: that is, the human as one whose glory and end is to be a human witness, a human correspondent to reality as determined by the self-revelation of the covenant keeping God. To be sure, such concerns are with respect to the finer points of his arguments. Students, pastors and academic theologians mindful of the anthropological implications of the self-disclosure of the God of the Gospel will no doubt be challenged and enriched by this text.