There was nearly a contradictory impression between the intensive influence Haecker exercised with his writings and the atmosphere he created as a person. And even after half a century it is not easy to approach him as a historical personality. He left little about his personal life in the sense of autobiographical notes. Richard Seewald, a painter and friend of his for several decades who has left us two portraits of Haecker, describes him in a farewell article: “He was one of the most quiet and most taciturn men I knew.” Most people who met him may have had “great respect for his uprightness and a little fear to be pierced through by his clear blue eyes radiating with an unusual power ... They seemed to ask all the time: Do you quite seriously mean what you are saying? Does your life correspond to your words?” On the other hand Sophie Scholl, one of the “White Rose” martyrs, told her friend about the “impressive hours” she spent with Haecker in the afternoon of February 4th 1943, when he read for a circle of friends from his theodicy Schopfer und Schopfung (Creator and Creation): “His words fall slowly like drops which you can see gathering in advance and which fall under this expectation with a very special weight. He has a very quiet face, a look as though he would look toward the inside. Nobody ever convinced me with his countenance as he did.”

Over the last three decades there has been a great outpouring of writings from both Catholic and Protestant theologians on the doctrine of the Trinity, almost all of which, ironically, have lamented the neglect of the doctrine. Again and again one reads that although the Trinity is central and crucially important to Christianity and Christian theology, it has not been given adequate treatment. It is unacceptable, theologians protest, that the Trinity has come to be regarded as an obscure and complex theological technicality, a piece of celestial mathematics impossible to understand and with little relevance to the life of the ordinary Christian. Karl Rahner remarked that modern Christians were ‘almost mere “monotheists’” paying lip service to the Trinity but in practice ignoring it. If it were announced that the dogma had been a mistake and was to be erased from official Christianity, nobody, he thought, would be too bothered, neither the ordinary believing Christians nor the authors of theological textbooks.’ Rahner’s diagnosis has been widely accepted and widely regretted. The consensus is that the Trinity is at the heart of Christianity, and both theology and piety have gone astray if it is regarded as belonging to the specialists. A retrieval (it is believed) is needed: the Trinity must be understood once again (one reads) as a positive and central element in the Christian faith rather than an embarrassing obscurity, and as profoundly relevant to the life of individual Christians, to the life of the Church, and perhaps beyond.