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Nevertheless, this vision of corporate worship as a locus for koinonia calls for realization in tangible ways, in particular forms, institutions, rites, texts, and other liturgical practices. Recent literature has sought to ground any number of liturgical practices in a theology of Trinitarian relationality. Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity is often the lead doctrine that introduces discussions of architecture emphasizing human relationality, more egalitarian visions of Christian leadership, a greater liturgical ecumenism and unity, the corporate nature of Christian prayer, more communal ways of receiving the sacraments, sermons that aim at restoration of community, corporate almsgiving as a basic for another action of Christian diakonia, corporate processes for the creation of liturgical art forms (over against treating liturgical artists as solitary geniuses who work independently from worshiping communities), greater inclusion of children and persons with disabilities, language that is inclusive and accessible, to say nothing of ideas for deepening the practice of the passing of the peace. Concern for Trinity-like relationality thus grounds and inspires several community-building worship practices. 2. The "Divine Mediation" ThemeA second primary theme in recent Trinitarian literature is a recovery of active awareness of the action of Christ and the Spirit as fully divine persons who prompt and mediate human acts of prayer, praise, and sacramental participation. Here the term Trinitarian is used as an antonym of "Pelagian" or any other term that implies that human instrumentality brings about a divine-human encounter. Note that the use of the term "Trinitarian" brings a different, though not incompatible, emphasis from the relational theme described above (theme 1). Consider this Trinitarian definition of Christian worship by Thomas F. Torrance: "In our worship the Holy Spirit comes forth from God, uniting us to the response and obedience and faith and prayer of Jesus, and returns to God, raising us up in Jesus to participate in the worship of heaven and in the eternal communion of the Holy Trinity."13 For Torrance (and for Moltmann, Colin Gunton, and dozens of other theologians) worship involves two directional movements—God's coming to the church and the church's reponse to God—both of which involve the action of each member of the Trinity. When Colin Gunton calls Ephesians 2:18 "a Trinitarian way of speaking," and when Vincent Brümmer speaks about the Holy Spirit's work of enabling the human response to God by saying that "God motivates us in a Trinitarian way to turn to him,"14 they refer not primarily to a notion of ecstatic relationality (theme 1), but to the divinity of the Son and Spirit as agents and mediators who act on or through us to make divine-human communication possible. The point here is that the agents that enable both God's coming to us and our response to God are not less than divine persons—whose work, as such, can be trusted to be efficacious. As Gunton concludes: "the first and last thing we have to say about God the Trinity is that he is a God who enables us to worship him."15 Any number of theologians could be quoted to illustrate this conceptualization. One is J.-J. von Allmen, who argues that the first, initiatory movement in the divine-human relationship enacted in liturgy is God's. In preaching, von Allmen concluded, "Christian preaching cannot therefore be understood apart from the doctrine of the Trinity: on the basis of the past work of His Son, and in the perspective of the work He is yet to do, God the Father gives us today, through the Holy Spirit, faith in the salvation which has been accomplished and hope in the salvation yet to be revealed."16 Likewise, the sacramental movement of worship is neatly summed up in a Trinitarian formulation. "The sacrament is the means which the Holy Spirit uses to convey Christ and His salvation to us....By the sacrament, the Holy Spirit binds the Christ to us"; and again, "The Christian place of worship is the assembly in which Jesus Christ, God's temple, is present, in the power of the Spirit."17 In short, in liturgy God comes to the worshiping community "in Christ, through the Spirit." These formulations suggest why the doctrine of the Trinity is so crucial: it ensures that both the content of Christian proclamation and the source for perceiving that content are not less than God. The God-humanward movement is complemented by a movement from human beings to God, a movement of faith, prayer, worship, and sacrifice. This movement, too, is frequently conceptualized in a Trinitarian way. Worship, praise, and prayer are offered "to the Father, in Christ, through the Spirit." Von Allmen's Trinitarian description of this human response begins with his analysis of the "messianic cult": the worship of God offered by Jesus Christ. He emphasized that Jesus' whole life was an act of priestly worship to God: "the true glorification of God on earth, which is the perfect worship, has been fulfilled by Jesus Christ in his ministry." He also insisted that this act of worship is ongoing, and is now rendered by Jesus to God in heaven: "the present of the history of salvation is the heavenly offering which Jesus Christ renders to His Father in the glory of the Ascension."18 Both Jesus' earthly life and Jesus' ongoing life in heaven are priestly. Our participation in Christ's worship is only possible because of the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a "liturgical agent" who makes possible and effects the worship of God. Christian worship "is born of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit." The Lord's Supper is only effectual because of the "quickening by the Holy Spirit"—"the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church means that worship is induced and brought into being." In sum, "the Holy Spirit brings us into communion with Christ." Whether in von Allmen's writings or elsewhere, such Trinitarian descriptions of the inner workings of worship are marked with a certain rhetorical symmetry: worship consists in proclamation from the Father in Christ through the Spirit, and response in the Spirit through Christ to the Father—patterns that have been called the "chiastic meta-narrative of scripture" and "doxological summaries of the history of salvation."19 Yet to get lost in the symmetry of such formulations and to miss their main point is easy. The point is to accent the way in which both revelation and response, both sacrament and sacrifice, are gifts of divine grace. The point is to preserve and make luminous the patristic instinct that both God's revelation and our human response are gifts to be received rather than accomplishments to be sought. The target of this assertion is a perennial temptation toward a kind of liturgical Pelagianism. So James B. Torrance, for example, is particularly concerned with theological schemes that correctly stress "God-humanward movement in Christ" but wrongly imply that "the human-Godward movement is still ours." He contends that this tendency ignores the priesthood of Christ, so that "the only priesthood is our priesthood, the only offering our offering, the only intercessions our intercessions." Torrance maintains that this vision implies that "God throws us back upon ourselves to make our response" and ignores that "God has already provided for us that Response which alone is acceptable to him—the offering made for the whole human race in the life, obedience and passion of Jesus Christ." Torrance argues that this distorted view of worship is functionally unitarian, operating apart from the work of the Holy Spirit and the mediatorship of Christ. Even though we sing Trinitarian hymns and observe Trinity Sunday, we approach God more like the pristine, isolated God of deism than like an active, mediating Presence. For Torrance the key thesis is that both "the God-humanward movement and human-Godward relationship" are "freely given to us in Jesus Christ."20 A theology of worship that emphasizes that worship is a gift of divine grace has inevitable consequences for how liturgy is celebrated.21 First, Christian worshipers acknowledge the giftedness of worship by means of epicletic prayers, prayers that express our longing for the Holy Spirit to work through liturgical actions to nurture and inspire faith; these are prayers typically offered at baptism and at the Lord's Supper, prayers for illumination prior to proclamation, and even prayers prior to our acts of praise, or in hymns like "Lord Jesus Christ, be present now." The epiclesis, concludes Hughes Oliphant Old, "is one of the basic acts of worship."22 It is a prayer, says Lukas Vischer, that "shows that the church must always appear before God with empty hands, even when she prepares and performs her worship in obedience to God."23 |
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