he" (101).
Beside the fact of Boff's declaring the necessity of an attitude of abstraction is the presumption or more exactly governing assumption of his entire work: He is addressing the community of faith, and more, he is addressing the community of the faithful, with a view toward explaining to that community what an appropriate orthodoxy, however modern, of the doctrine of the Trinity is. To put it another way, skeptics need not apply and probably couldn't understand that part of the discussion that they might accept. Only a man of faith could write in a highly structured epistemological format that "those who allow themselves to be guided by the inspiration of the Spirit accept the Son and those who accept the Son come to see the paternal and maternal face of God" (101). The subtext here is that a leap of faith will be required for acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity that, as we shall explain shortly, is the appropriate mode of acceptance. Shades of meaning do matter, and one must be prepared to adopt such meanings as are about to be described. The skeptic would perhaps suggest that this is another way of saying I and the Church (for what else is a doctrine predicated of?) are right, and those who do not conform to doctrine are wrong. But it is not beyond all reason to point out that, however epistemologically sound Boff's argument may be, a reader unfamiliar with the requirements of orthodoxy could be expected to infer that by the time the argument is completed he or she will have understood what the Church expects the faithful to believe about the Trinity. This is a point to which we shall return, and it is as well to say right here that Boff repeatedly returns to the errors of understanding that other--need one add unorthodox?--Trinitarian commentators and theorists have had.
Having discussed at some length the abstractions and semiotics of Trinitarian doctrine, Boff puts forward the problem of understanding of the d...