octrine in its epistemological context. That is, he cites what could conveniently be called the tension between the traditional theological (i.e., Catholic) explanation and understanding of the Trinity and what he calls "a changed cultural situation" (111). This is simply a way of describing the theological problem of how the Trinity can be understood in the modern world. Yet Boff's approach to the fact that modern understandings of God are informed by a whole range of sectarian and secular philosophical traditions instead of by the institutional features of the thirteenth-century Church is to declare that only the "initiate," which is apparently to say the community of theologians, can "really" understand the Trinity and explain it to and discuss it with one another. The hoi polloi of modern life need therefore to have the doctrine presented to them in the right way, so that to the degree their feeble potentialities can apprehend it, they do so in the appropriate way.
This chapter is the keystone of Boff's entire essay, for it is in this cha
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