A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Trinitarian hijinks

Today our congregation started incorporating elements from the new worship book produced by the ELCA and approved at this summer’s churchwide assembly. Though the book itself won’t be in use til this fall as I understand it.

Now, I freely admit to being resistant to change; just when I get used to a particular liturgy they go and change it on me. This forces me to focus on the liturgy when the point is to have our attention on God. The liturgy is, after all, an instrument of worship, and an instrument works best when you scarcely notice you’re using it, right?

Nevertheless, change is sometimes necessary I suppose. But what I’ve seen so far isn’t too encouraging. There were two changes in particular that I noticed. The first was the response after the first reading. Usually, after finishing the reading, the reader says, “The Word of the Lord,” and the congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.” But today it was “Holy wisdom, holy word”/”Thanks be to God.” I’m not really sure why that change was made, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that it actually dates back to the early church.

The other, more significant change was in the Trinitarian invocation at the end of the service. Instead of “May God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit bless you now and forever” we got “Holy Eternal Majesty, Holy Incarnate Word, Holy Abiding Spirit, one God, bless you now and forever.” While admittedly not as bad as the popular, and highly theologically dubious, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” I admit that I don’t really think that the Trinitarian name is something we should be monkeying around with. I’m all for gender neutral or feminine images being used to balance out traditional masculine imagery, but the Christian Church has always held that the Trinitarian name is part of God’s self-revelation. It’s not something we came up with ourselves. It’s God’s proper name. As Robert Jenson put it:

From time to time, varous concerns lead to proposed replacements of the trinitarian name, for example, “In the name of God: Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” or “In the name of God the Ground, God the Logos, and God the Spirit.” All such parodies disrupt the faith’s self-identity at the level of its primal and least-reflected historicity.

Such attempts presuppose that we first now about a triune God and then look about for a form of words to address him, when in fact it is the other way around. Moreover, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier,” for example, is, like other such phrases, not a name at all. It is rather an assemblage of after-the-fact theological abstractions, useful in their place but not here. Such assemblages cannot even be made into names, for they do not identify. Every putative deity must claim, for example, somehow to “create,” “redeem,” and “sanctify.” There are also, to be sure, numerous candidates to be “Father” or “Spirit,” but within the trinitarian name, “the Father” is not primarily our Father, but the Father of the immediately next-named Son, that is, of Jesus. The “Holy Spirit” within the name, is not merely any “spirit” claiming to be holy, but the communal spirit of the just-named Jesus and his Father. By these relations inside the phrase, “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” is historically specific and can be what liturgy and devotion–and at its base, all theology–must have, a proper name of God. (The Triune God, p. 17)

By all means, experiment with a variety of images for God. Many of our hymns do this wonderfully. But the Trinitarian name isn’t something to be cast aside for the sake of change or for some politically correct agenda.

21 responses to “Trinitarian hijinks”

  1. Joshie

    I’m with you on this one Lee. Plus, there’s a subtle shift in the ref to the 2nd person of the Trinity. “The Son” is of course, the word, but the Son and the “incarnate” word are not synonymous. The Son, with the birth of Jesus, became incarnate, but the Son was not incarnate before that point. The Son was still spirit, not incarnate. Plus, all three hypostases are co-eternal, so there’s a problem with calling only one of them eternal.

    The “holy wisdom, holy word” thing may be a way of bringing feminine images (back?) into the liturgy by making a reference to Wisdom, the companion to God (sophia in Greek) pictured in biblical and apocryphal sapiential literature, most notably in Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon. Sophia (the noun in Greek and the Hebrew word chakmah are both feminine) has been seen as a feminine image of the second person of the trinity as there is an obvious link between the sophia and the logos of God. Passages the speak of the nature of sophia like Prov. 8.22-31, Wisdom 7.22-8.4 and Sirach 24.1-7 have had a big impact in the way the Christian tradition has spoken about the second persona of the Trinity.

    Anyway, yeah.

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  2. Maurice Frontz

    I think that I will go schizophrenic on this one.

    Thinking positively: the alternate invocations for the Trinitarian name could have been worse. It at least does not drop into outright modalism. They are not to be used in the rite of baptism. Congregations can still use the online materials without purchasing the books, so that those who remain committed to the proper naming of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit need not use the language or even have it in the pews.

    Thinking negatively: arrrgh. We have no agreement in the ELCA on the naming of God. We in effect have competing theologies of God depending on who is in the pulpit and no way to resolve our differences except who can shout the loudest. The RW people either advocated for or buckled under to this change. Every single synodical and churchwide worship service will feature the “new,” “modern,” “inclusive” invocations. I will send my youth group out to college, out to move to different places, and do I tell them to find an ELCA church? Maybe not, because I know that it’s possible, even probable, that they will be fed bad theology.

    Positive: Maybe people like Lee will freak out. Maybe it’ll be like the version of the Lord’s Prayer which didn’t take.

    Negative: Maybe it won’t.

    Thank God it’s Easter.

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  3. graham old

    Gotta disagree with you on this one, Lee. I think that using language like these names were given by God, rather than chosen by people is just strange plain. Unless we’re going to resort to a dictation understanding of inspiration, I think that such arguments are far from conclusive.

    I may be wrong, but isn’t it that case that – even if these names were given from above – the terminology of ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ was used because it made sense and conveyed the reality behind the terms.

    I think that Jenson gets dangerous close to assuming that the ‘analogy’ of the trinity actually, adequately and exhaustively describes the essence of God. And that would be ironically far from the intention of the Fathers.

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  4. Lee

    Joshie – I’m guessing you’re right about “Holy wisdom, Holy word.” In fact, I should’ve made the connection with the Sophia tradtion since the book I’m reading right now on the Trinity by Gerald O’Collins spends a good part of a chapter talking about the Wisdom tradition as background to later Trinitarian thinking. I don’t really have a problem with incorporating some of this into the liturgy.

    Also, good points on the reference to the 2nd person and “eternal.” It seems to me that almost every proposed new Trinitarian formula runs into problems like this.

    Pr. Frontz – I don’t know if people will freak out. I’m not sure how many people will even notice. I guess part of what worries me about this is that the catechesis in many of our churches is poor enough as it is, and the liturgy is probably where most of us are exposed to the teachings of the church the most. Not every layperson is an amateur theology nerd!

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  5. Joshie

    Some theologies are certainly “badder” than others, but bad theology has always been around and always be around, there’s no way to protect young people from everything out there, we just have to trust that we have trained them up in the way they should go and rely on the Holy Spirit for the rest.

    Diverse views of God (up to a point) are not necessarily a bad thing, are they? Is the best denomination one where everybody is in lock-step agreement on every issue, just for the sake of “speaking with one voice”? Instead of always speaking, maybe sometimes we just need to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

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  6. Joshie

    Weird, when I posted, there were just two responses. For the sake of clarification my comments were a response to pastor Frontz’s

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  7. Lutheran Zephyr

    I believe that for most of the liturgies in RW options exist for using the “traditional” Lord’s Prayer or the “new” (less archaic) Lord’s Prayer. I believe, too, that alternatives exist for benedictions and other texts, too.

    In the end it is up to the local congregation and pastor to determine what liturgical language and formulas they want to use. We are a church that has liturgical variety and freedom – we don’t mandate a liturgy in our church, though we do have a fairly well-defined tradition that most congregations adhere to in one way or another. If you don’t like something, talk with your pastor about it.

    Additionally, someone said that they prefer to use worship books rather than comprehensive worship bulletins, because when you hold a book in your hand you are holding a great variety of liturgies, prayers, and manners of worship. When a congregation hands you a single comprehensive worship bulletin, all you see is one way to worship. In a sense, when the laity do not have a worship book in their hands, they lose access to the broad spectrum of worship and prayer, and are limited to whatever the pastor chooses to put into the bulletin. Some argue that a comprehensive worship bulletin disempowers the laity, whereas a worship book (full of options and variety) empowers the laity.

    And finally, in response to Pastor Frontz: in every denomination the “quality” of preaching, teaching, theology, liturgy, and ministry varies from parish to parish. I sure hope that you wouldn’t discourage your youth from seeking out ELCA churches just because some pastors prefer to use alternate language to describe God . . . .

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  8. Lutheran Zephyr

    FYI, The most up-to-date draft of liturgical texts for the new worship book are on the Renewing Worship website (www.renewingworship.org).

    Click on “Texts from Evangelical Lutheran Worship” in the left-hand column of the main page, and then scroll down and click Holy Communion to view the liturgical texts for the new worship book.

    I only gave it a quick glance, but I did notice at least two options for every prayer and blessing, and I did not see the trinitarian formula you mentioned (but admittedly, I only looked quickly).

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  9. Lee

    Blogger’s been screwy most of the morning, so comments posted earlier have only recently appeared. Don’t know what their deal is.

    Graham – I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with your disagreement. 😉 I think Jenson’s point is that, as Christians, we name God in reference to the relationship revealed between Jesus, the one he called “Father” and the Spirit sent to the church. That’s, as it were, the primary level of Christian discourse about God. We might, as he says, employ various words and concepts for exploring that, but “Father-Son-Holy Spirit” is the bedrock because it connects us to the historic specificity of the Gospel.

    I’m also reminded of something C.S. Lewis said about replacing supposedly anthropomorphic images for God with supposedly more refined ones. What you end up with most times is something that is no less metaphorical, but a lot less vivid and compelling (“Eternal ground” anyone?)

    Joshie – I agree with you that a diversity of theologies is to be welcomed. And, anyway, that’s what we have, like it or not! If anything, though, I think the ELCA (and perhaps some of our sister denominations) have a harder time nowadays speaking with one voice than they do welcoming theological diversity. I’m not really sure how you maintain that balance, though. For what it’s worth, I think you need some touchstone of commonality while allowing theologians to be creative and explore the edges and grey areas. Despite their obvious difficulties, I sometimes admire the way Episcopalians have long had their liturgy as an instrument and expression of unity even while allowing a wide diversity of theologies. In a way I think this gets the priorities right because worship ought to be prior to theology in the church’s life, IMO. But just as certainly theology is going to inform worship, so you need to make sure you’ve got your theology right too. All of which is to say I don’t know how to strike the unity/diversity balance. How’s that for a bold claim? 🙂

    LZ – I appreciate your point. On the other hand, congregationalism has its dangers. If we want to think of ourselves as (small-c) catholic, doesn’t there need to be a way whereby we are held accountable to the larger church and its traditions? Again, this is another area where we could debate the benefits of more congreational vs. hierarchical polities all the live-long day. Something to think about, though.

    Thanks, everyone, for the great comments. Keep ’em coming!

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  10. Maurice Frontz

    Yes, last night I was thinking about this after I posted, and yes, it is true that theologies always differ. One of the things that has kept me somewhat realistic about being in the ELCA is that the greener pastures one would be tempted to see elsewhere are often an illusion; the oasis is often a mirage. One gets really diverse and sometimes lousy liturgy, theology, preaching, etc. just as much in say, your neighborhood Catholic mass or evangelical worship service. And I certainly wouldn’t steer youth away from Lutheranism. I do wonder, though, just how enthusiastic I can be about the ELCA as a “brand.” And I certainly would not say that simply because the church sign reads “Lutheran” that it’s the best choice out there. Indeed, to the extent that a church or ministry has departed from the (broad) catholic and confessional tradition, the church or ministry is “Lutheran” in name only.

    Is this issue of Trinitarian language a departure from the (broad) catholic and confessional tradition? I would argue that it is, or at least comes darn close. Those who accuse “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” of being a human construction have nothing better to offer than other human constructions. What is more, I cannot be a child of “Holy Eternal Majesty,” any more than I can be a brother of “Holy Incarnate Word.” The familial language of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” (and incidentally of the Church as “Mother Church”), even if it is metaphorical, is so essential to Jesus’ own self-identification, Scripture’s witness as to the Christian’s identity, and the tradition’s living out of that identity, that to suggest that it can be improved upon or freely improvised upon might be seen as sheer hubris in any other age but our own.

    I would agree that having a worship book that people can share is ideal. We use a printed bulletin that has the whole service except for the hymns, and we have LBWs in the pew. We do that for reasons of clarity and welcoming to newcomers. When the worship book has a number of non-desirable elements, then I wonder if the costs of using the worship book outweigh the benefits.

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  11. Eric Lee

    Lee, your summation of Jenson’s argument is a good one (although in place of “the historic specificity of the Gospel,” he would say the “Biblical narrative,” but same difference), but the book you have there labeled is “The Triune God” when you actually quoted from and linked to his The Triune Identity— his earlier work. I actually just finished reading his The Triune God last week and a lot of the arguments are similar, but more refined, than in this earlier work. I was reading that quotation you posted and was thinking to myself, “this sound familiar, but not quite so…”, heh.

    Other than that, I would agree with your initial concerns about the Trinitarian language. The “Father, Son, Holy Spirit” language doesn’t have anything to do with God’s ‘gender’ (for all gender and thus all difference is in God), but about God’s relationality, which is why I agree with you they must be preserved, because this is how we speak of the Triune God.

    Peace,

    Eric

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  12. Lee

    Eric, you’re right – it is The Triune Identity. My bad. I’m reading a book right now by Gerry O’Collins called The Tripersonal God – probably conflated them in my wee brain.

    I also came across a good brief article online by Jenson’s partner in crime (and many edited volumes) Carl Braaten, here (scroll down):

    http://www.luthersem.edu/word&world/Archives/11-1_Death/11-1_Face_to_Face.pdf

    Braaten says:

    “The controversy boils down to this one theological point. The God of Jesus Christ appeared in history with a specific name. Christian faith is thenceforth bound up with Jesus and the One he called ‘heavenly Father.’ Jesus’ heavenly Father is none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus called this God his ‘Abba’ in the most intimate language possible. This God was not his mother. He knew who his mother was, and so do we. Jesus’ Abba could love like a mother and care like a mother. The Bible and the Christian tradition have set ample precedents for using feminine analogies, similes, and metaphors in speaking about God. If that is what is meant by inclusive language, I am in favor of it.

    “When it comes to the name of God, however, that is a qualitatively different matter. God has a name, a nom propre. On account of Jesus’ particular relationship to God he is revealed as the Son of God the Father. On account of Jesus, too, we believe in the Holy Spirit whom he sent. No possible change in the relations between men and women, in the family structure, or in the social order could justify a revision of God’s name, without altering the faith itself. Any change in God’s name points to a different religion. A different name names a different God and a different gospel. That’s what the controversy is all about.”

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  13. Joshie

    It may be unfair to pin this on him with just two paragraphs quoted, but Braaten seems to be falling prey this idea that gender specific language about God is an iherernt part of the gospel, and that while God IS father, God is only “like” a mother. He also falls prey to this myth that “abba” is somehow an intimate term like “daddy”, which it is not (but as Alton Brown might say, that’s another show).

    As Eric astutely pointed out, the father and son language is about relationship, not gender. When Braaten says “No possible change in the relations between men and women, in the family structure, or in the social order could justify a revision of God’s name, without altering the faith itself”, he seems to be saying God is Father as opposed to mother instead of Father as opposed to Son.

    That is a misogynistic or at least highly sexist view of the gospel that places one gender on a cosmic level while putting another one on an a merely metaphorical one. Are we to place the Bible’s imagery of God as mother on a lower plane than that of God as Father? Or are we to dismiss theologians like Julian of Norwich, who spoke eloquently of God as mother centuries before feminism as the ravings of a mad woman (not to mention a mystic, and English!) ? Or Jesus’ resurrection appearances to women as of no significicance? Or the parallels in John’s Gospel (where all the Father-Son language is most prominent, btw) between the logos and sophia of God as wrong headed? To say the Father language is the essence of the gospel and the mother language is merely similie is arbitrary, and frankly, vicious.

    If that’s what Braaten calls the gospel, I fail to see how that’s good news.

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  14. graham old

    Lee, on the whole, I like Jenson, but I think he is just barking up the wrong tree.

    The minute we admit that we are dealing with an anthropomorphism, we need to recognise the imperfect and temporal nature of the analogy. That analogy happens to explain something of the inter-trinitarian ontology, but we know that Jesus is not actually the ‘son’ of the Father. It’s just that Father-Son-Spirit expresses something of the truth. So, why is it such a big step to assume that in certain times and places the analogy will no longer express and convey the truth behind it.

    It’s not about finding more refined anthropomorphisms, but more effective and appropriate ones.

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  15. Lee

    Joshie – I didn’t read Braaten that way, though you may be on to something. I read him as saying that we can’t abandon the particularity of Gospel story. I think the category of “narrative” that Eric introduced might be helpful here. Part of the reason that the name “Father, Son & Holy Spirit” names the Christian God in a way that no other name does is perhaps because it’s a kind of shorthand for the Christian story. No other name would do that job.

    I’m fairly certain that Braaten would not attribute gender to God. I think what he’s saying is that God is called “Father” because Jesus addressed him as Father and we are able to do likewise only on account of Jesus.

    I think we run a serious risk if we try to detach our thought about God from the concrete particularity of the Gospel story. It’s tempting to assume that we know what God must be like and then cast about for words that we think do a better job expressing that reality. That doesn’t mean that words like “Father” aren’t analogical, but they are the words we’ve been given by the one who we think reveals the true nature of God.

    And it also doesn’t mean (at least I don’t think it means) that we can’t use other names for God. But I think the Trinitarian name retains a kind of priority in virtue of its connection with the Gospel story. Christianity isn’t a religion of abstract ahistorical truths but one of a God who actually entered history and has a particular story.

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  16. Maurice Frontz

    If I can draw out the “narrative” understanding about which Lee speaks: in his incarnation, the second person of the Trinity did not relate to the first person of the Trinity as “Holy Eternal Majesty,” or, “Creator,” or “Breather,” or “Speaker,” even “God.” The second person called the first person, “Father.” Nor did the First Person of the Trinity, according to the Scriptures, relate to the second person as “breath” or “Word.” The second person was named “Son.” Jesus’ understanding, the relation between him and God was Son to Father. This is the understanding that each individual Gospel, Paul’s letters, the letter to the Hebrews, etc., etc. assume about the relationship. Moreover, it is the Gospel of John, in which we receive the theological understanding of the second person as “Word,” where we have the most dramatic understanding of the familial relationship of the Trinity.

    Moreover, in baptism we are adopted into that relationship by the gift of the Holy Spirit shared by Father and Son. We now share in the honor of being called sons and daughters of God. In other words, we relate to the first person not as Majesty, not as Creator, but primarily as Father. We relate to Jesus not as Word, or Breath, but primarily as brother. And we do so by virtue of being gifted with the family Spirit – the Spirit of holiness.

    The Easter Gospel from John witnesses beautifully to this. When Mary Magdalene recognizes Jesus, Jesus says to her: Go to my brothers and say to them: “I am ascending to your Father and my Father, to your God and my God. (20:17, italics mine).

    When I do baptismal counseling and teach confirmation, I teach that through baptism men and women become adopted sons or daughters of God, that God is their Father, that Jesus is their brother, and that all Christians are their brothers or sisters. This is the understanding to which the whole of the New Testament witnesses. If you take out or diminish the familial relationship, or say that it is one metaphor among others, even if you use other Scriptural appellations such as “Word,” you are destroying or at least obscuring that narrative, Trinitarian understanding not only of Jesus’ life but of our life in Christ. You destroy or at least obscure the idea of the essential unity of the Trinity as well.

    So, graham old, it’s not that the Trinitarian formula merely expresses something of the truth; it expresses an essential truth in such a way that we cannot use a different formula for the Trinity without doing violence to the truth.

    That is, if you believe that there is such a thing as revealed truth in the Scriptures, which is not in my opinion a necessary prelude to a literal understanding. But this is about Scriptural authority, and whether it actually witnesses to Jesus. I get the feeling that those who think that any old words will do are the same ones who deep down think that Jesus was a lot different than the Bible presents him.

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  17. graham old

    Pastor Frontz,

    Thanks for your response.

    So, graham old, it’s not that the Trinitarian formula merely expresses something of the truth; it expresses an essential truth in such a way that we cannot use a different formula for the Trinity without doing violence to the truth.

    I’m not sure what you mean by an “essential” truth. Do you mean that literally, as in it expresses the essence of God. If that’s the case then I would have to disagree in the strongest terms.

    However, even if that is what you mean, I just don’t see why a difference formula could not be used. Don’t you think that a young man brought up in a matriarchal society could express the truth behind the formula without using exactly the same terms?

    I just don’t think language works the way that is implied in this discussion. And I think you end up with people who would otherwise shy away from literalistic dictation theories employing them here.

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  18. Maurice Frontz

    Graham, in this I agree with what I believe Lee to be saying in many of his comments, that the Trinitarian formula as tradition has passed it down connects us with the particularity of the Gospel. There was a particular Jewish male, Jesus of Nazareth, who called God his “Father,” who believed that he himself was God’s
    “Son,” and who spoke of the Holy Spirit as his and that Father’s Holy Spirit and said that this Holy Spirit would be poured upon his disciples. When you change the words, you disconnect the Trinitarian doctrine from Jesus’ own particular self-understanding and the Church’s subsequent understanding of his particularity within God. Lee has rightly said something like, “any move from the particular to the universal can usually be understood in hindsight as the universalization of a new particular.”

    The other danger that I see, and this is related, is that the term, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is a christological understanding of God. It says something about Christ. God is not “our Father,” but Jesus’ father. We are not created as children of God, we are adopted children of God through Christ, sealed by the Spirit. When substituting a more universal formula, be it “Eternal Majesty, Incarnate Word, Abiding Spirit” or whatever, you are not talking about God’s trintarian relationship within himself, you are talking about three different ways God relates to us. If that’s not outright modalism, it skates on very thin ice.

    The “essential” truth as I see it is not that God is male (God is not male) but that God has revealed himself as Trinity in a certain way in history, as the Father of Jesus, as the Son of the Father, as the Spirit they share. And you cannot change the words of that name without doing violence to the truth that the name reveals.

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  19. Anonymous

    Re: “Usually, after finishing the reading, the reader says, “The Word of the Lord,” and the congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.” But today it was “Holy wisdom, holy word”/”Thanks be to God.””

    In Anglican circles “the Word of the Lord”/”Thanks be to God” is also the norm, but nowadays it’s quite frequent to hear “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church”/”Thanks be to God” instead. I don’t know why. It’s not in the Prayer Book so I don’t like it. 😉

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  20. Anonymous

    ok, out of curiosity I googled “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church” and I found this from the Bishop of Montreal in 1999:

    “I have authorized for liturgical use the ascription “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church” as an alternative to “The word of the Lord”, following the readings from Scripture. It is itself a saying from the Scriptures (in the Book of Revelation). It was introduced to Anglican liturgical use by the Church of New Zealand, and is now finding wider use in the Communion.”

    But I still prefer “The Word of the Lord”.

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  21. PastorJack

    Evangelical Lutheran Worship is a dangerous book. It’s best to avoid it all together. It is an attack upon the catholic doctrine of the Trinity as it was received by the Lutheran Reformers of the 16th Century. It is an affront to true Lutheran worship. The changing of ancient liturgical texts, creeds, and even the Scriptures to promote a politically correct pro-feminist agenda will inevitably lead to a watering down of the faith. This new book is a big mistake.

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