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Third, this calls for music and liturgical texts that are winsomely subversive. Consider John Bell's Advent hymn, with its nuanced treatment of the militaristic image of "Lord of hosts."
Here is a text concerned with refining common assumptions about divine attributes. It uses the life of Jesus to reinterpret how we understand divine life, illustrating one of the main concerns in much of recent systematic theology. Concluding AnalysisWith respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, distinguishing these five themes highlights the ways in which this single doctrine has been used to make so many different points. One way of sensing the breadth of the use of the doctrine of the Trinity would be to imagine a hypothetical entry for the term "Trinitarian" in a lexicon of modern theological terminology. Such an entry would require at least five distinct definitions. Perhaps that entry would read: Trinitarian (adj.): 1. a communitarian approach to ordering human relationships in the church and in society as a mirror or icon of divine life; antonym: individualistic; 2. a formulation of the divine-human relationship that stresses that divine revelation as well as human faith, prayer, and worship are actions of divine agents, and as such are gifts of divine grace; antonym: Pelagian; 3. a theological system based on reflection on the historical actions of Jesus of Nazareth and the Holy Spirit as recorded in Scripture; antonym: speculative, abstract; 4. a self-consciously comprehensive, unified, and synthetic approach to theology; antonym: christomonistic, Unitarian; 5. a doctrine of God that insists that God is a transcendently and immanently personal, acting, relational, and self-giving Being; antonym: deistic, pantheistic. In this way, the doctrine of the Trinity is directly linked with many doctrinal loci: theological methodology, hermeneutics, theology proper, soteriology, and ecclesiology. Trinitarian worship is about much more than appending a Gloria Patri at the end of a Psalm, singing the Te Deum, or not beginning a sermon on Trinity Sunday with an apologetic statement of regret. It is about reconceiving the purpose and meaning of the entire grammar of the liturgical event, reconsidering how we approach God, constitute communities, and imagine God and these communities interacting. Further, these five themes travel rather well ecumenically (though this short paper can't adequately demonstrate this). Each of the five could be illustrated with phrases from the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy or Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry, or (as in this paper) primarily with theological voices from the Reformed-Presbyterian tradition. At least at this level of detail, these five themes appear in Barth, Balthasar, and Rahner; Calvin, Luther, and Wesley; Irenaeus, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa (albeit with instructive nuances in each case)—a very healthy sign that we are getting near themes that are fundamental to Christian practice. This paper also provides a window into the relationship of theology and practice. First, it has established that a Trinitarian theology of liturgy has several concrete corollaries. Any observant cultural anthropologist who might attend a Christian assembly would notice the practices this paper has mentioned. Immanuel Kant was simply wrong when he lampooned the doctrine of the Trinity as entirely impractical. Second, it suggests that the rationale for a given liturgical action makes a big difference in how we practice it. Along the way I have described many traditional practices (traditional eucharistic prayers, epicletic prayers, collects), but suggested explicitly theological motivations or rationale for their adoption—which in turns affects how we practice them. If the Christian year is valuable in part because it at once concretizes and opens up our view of God, then it does little good to eliminate biblical historical narratives from these observances (or, conversely, to focus exclusively on narrative). The doctrine of the Trinity is not a liturgical constitution that generates a host of minor liturgical ordinances and statutes. It does not produce neat formulas and tidy liturgical recipes that are universally applicable. This paper has called for liturgy that rehearses the divine economy, but it does not say that regular adherence to the Christian year is the only way to accomplish it. This paper has described the logic that undergirds the collect form for Christian prayer, but it in no way justifies the exclusive use of the collect. Typically, particular doctrines invite a range of practices with which they cohere. This is why the doctrine is just as important—perhaps even more important—for a free, evangelical church without a significant liturgical tradition, as it is for an Eastern Orthodox congregation that is not likely to abandon Trinitarian worship any time in the next several centuries. |
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