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Second, a theology of worship as a graced event calls for liturgical proclamation that is explicitly rooted in God's revelation in Jesus Christ through the Spirit. Just as the praise and prayer of the church is an act of acknowledgment, recognition, reception, and participation in the mediation of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, so too liturgical proclamation is best conceived as participation in, and grateful reception of, the gift of the Word of God. Liturgical proclamation does not require generating a new message, a new Word, a new gospel; it simply requires rehearsing the gospel given in Christ. As von Allmen argued, "We do not have to invent what we are to say, we have only to listen and pass it on." This occurs, he contended, through preaching that calls attention to God's work in Christ: "Preaching is none other than the preaching of Jesus Christ." Preaching that ignores what God has done in Christ elicits "an existential despair in which everything must be started afresh."24 Third, a theology of worship as a graced event calls for acts that acknowledge the mediation of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. This occurs explicitly in Trinitarian formulas at the end of sung psalms or spoken prayers—and especially prayers offered to God in the name of Jesus through the Spirit, or through Jesus in the Spirit, a practice more thoroughly appreciated since Josef A. Jungmann's classic study The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer appeared. As Donald Bloesch argues: "To pray in the name of Christ . . . means that we recognize that our prayers cannot penetrate the tribunal of God unless they are presented to the Father by the Son."25 Trinitarian doxologies at the end of prayers, sermons, absolutions, and benedictions all attest that the action being completed is accomplished only as a gift of grace.26 They emphasize, concluded von Allmen, that "the whole service is taking place in the presence, under the authority, and with the power of the Holy Trinity."27 Such liturgical formulas are acts of recognition, reception, and participation; they are the explicit acknowledgment of a Trinitarian theology of worship as a graced event. The challenge here is enacting these elements of liturgy in ways that bring the mediation of Son and Spirit into the consciousness of ordinary worshipers—who may otherwise live with the implicit feeling that the success of a worship service depends either on the prowess of the local preacher or musician or on their own mental efforts to make worship work. We who preach or lead music violate this principle every time we unwittingly promote a rather sacramental view of ourselves as the ones who engineer a spiritual experience for people. Rather, our goal should be, in the words of a well-known John Bell hymn, to help people sense the Trinity "round me, above and beneath, before and behind" in worship and in life.28 Offering the faithful such an all-encompassing and grace-filled vision to supplant the rather vague and impersonal notions of deity that our culture perpetuates is an act of profound pastoral care. 3. The Divine Economy ThemeThe third theme in recent literature is a renewed emphasis on the divine economy as the basis for our knowledge of God—a theme established by Karl Barth's claim "God is as God revealed himself to be" and Karl Rahner's rule that the "immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity," and vice versa. The Princeton theologian Daniel Migliore articulates the pay-off of these basic assertations in observing: "Classical Trinitarian doctrine...wants to say that there is no sinister or even demonic side of God altogether different from what we know in the story of Jesus who befriended the poor and forgave sinners. God is self-expanding, other-affirming, community-building love."29 Here the term "Trinitarian" is being used as an antonym to theology that is speculative, abstract, ethereal, or vague. From the start, the doctrine of the Trinity has rested on the high Christological claims of Colossians and Hebrews that Christ is the "image [or icon] of the invisible God" (Col 1:15), the "exact imprint of God's being" (Heb 1:3). In contrast to the Greek inclination to define the concept of God on the basis of philosophically-derived ideals, the doctrine of the Trinity implies that human beings have a better, more direct and immediate source for knowledge of God in the person of Christ. And so, in contrast to Arianism, the doctrine of the Trinity argued that the real God was not a pristine higher power disconnected from the actions of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In contrast to Sabellianism, the doctrine of the Trinity contended that God's actions in history are not mere shadows or masks of divine being, but are rather a reliable indicator of God's very nature. No—the doctrine of the Trinity boldly asserted that Christ and the Spirit are reliable signs of God's nature, for they themselves are truly divine. In Colin Gunton's words, the doctrine of the Trinity ensures that our thinking about God does not "float off into abstraction from the concrete history of salvation."30 As Gunton concludes, this line of thinking "is based upon an insight of blinding simplicity: if Jesus Christ is God, then God is really given in him, and does not have to be sought behind or apart from him."31 Typically, extrapolations of this theme come with three large complaints: (a) that a lot of theological discourse historically has featured separate rather than integrated treatments of the oneness and threeness of God; (b) that a lot of theological discourse historically has featured separate rather than integrated treatments of the economic and immanent Trinity; and (c) that in all of this the influence of Plato and Hellenic thought patterns is vast and damaging. Extrapolations of this theme usually feature forthright methodological prescriptions, which aim at what Moltmann called "the theological remoulding of philosophical terms."32 The goal is that whenever we speak of God, describe God, invoke God, or call God to mind, we do so in terms of the concrete ways in which God has been made known rather than through abstract concepts that are especially susceptible to being reshaped by culture's shfting intellectual climate. Thus this theme is a campaign against idolatry, whereby our worship is mistargeted toward a god of our own imaginations. The liturgical corollary of this theme is simply that just as the Christian doctrine of God should be rooted in the divine economy, so too Christian worship should rehearse the divine economy. God's actions in history are the basis for both the knowledge and worship of the triune God. Liturgy, like theology, must not "float off into abstractions" about God. In other words, Christian liturgy is fundamentally an act of anamnesis, an act of rehearsing God's actions in history: past and future, realized and promised. Christians identify the God they worship by naming God as the agent of particular actions in history. Worship proceeds better by rehearsing eventful narratives of divine action—viewed iconically as reliable windows into divine life—than by re-stating rational deductions or abstract ideas. It is more like Masaccio's Trinity—in which we perceive God through the iconic cross. This emphasis on God's actions in history is reflected in several theological definitions of worship. Jean-Jacques von Allmen insisted that "liturgy connects the Church with the history of salvation...it unites the Church of all places and times around the permanently decisive magnalia Dei."33 John Burkhart posits that "true worship celebrates the most definite God of the covenant in Moses and Jesus, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, and of countless others. Fundamentally, worship is the celebrative response to what God has done, is doing, and promises to do."34 E. H. van Olst contends that in liturgy "people come together to celebrate the mighty acts of God...the basic structure of the saving acts of God [in which] the remembrance of Israel as well as the liturgical celebration of the church is rooted."35 |
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