Church of the Triune God

Contents

List of contributors

5

Introduction Michael P Jensen

8

PART 1: TRINITARIAN THINKERS

11

Athanasius 12

Mark Baddeley

Augustine 29

Mark Thompson

Calvin 55

John McClean

Cranmer and sixteenth-century Anglican Ecclesiology 71

Ashley Null

Karl Barth 87

Peter G Bolt

TF Torrance 106

Benjamin Dean

DB Knox Rory Shiner

123

PART 2: TRINITARIAN THEMES

141

Christian living 142

Andrew Cameron

Contents

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Contents

List of contributors

5

Introduction Michael P Jensen

8

PART 1: TRINITARIAN THINKERS

11

Athanasius 12

Mark Baddeley

Augustine 29

Mark Thompson

Calvin 55

John McClean

Cranmer and sixteenth-century Anglican Ecclesiology 71

Ashley Null

Karl Barth 87

Peter G Bolt

TF Torrance 106

Benjamin Dean

DB Knox Rory Shiner

123

PART 2: TRINITARIAN THEMES

141

Christian living 142

Andrew Cameron

Contents

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Preaching Kanishka Raffel

161

Prayer Chew-Chern Morgan

177

Anglican identity Ashley Null

191

Mission Greg Anderson

204

Bibliography

219

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Church of the Triune God

Part 1

Trinitarian thinkers

Athanasius Unity, feasting and rich mercy: The significance of the Trinity for the Church in Athanasius’ festal letters Mark Baddeley

A

thanasius might seem like an obvious candidate to discuss the significance of the Trinity for the Church, given his important role in helping to elucidate and defend the biblical teaching on the Trinity throughout his tempestuous career. However, as I hope this discussion will demonstrate, there are some unusual features, by contemporary standards, in how Athanasius relates the Trinity to the Church, as well as a number of rich insights. In order to show this, I will opt to focus on a relatively small number of extracts from Athanasius’ corpus rather than offer a wide-ranging synthesis of his thought on the matter in the writer’s own words. The primary reason for this method is to provide the reader with more opportunity to reflect upon Athanasius’ ideas as he himself presents them, and the opportunity to more easily compare the interpretation offered to the text being interpreted, even if it comes at the cost of offering a far more limited window into the kinds of ways in which Athanasius brings out the significance of the Trinity for the Church.

In particular, this exploration will focus entirely on Athanasius’ festal letters, an arguably idiosyncratic decision. Athanasius’ festal letters were annual circular letters to his diocese to inform the churches of the date of Easter for that year, as getting the date

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of Easter right was in the fourth century a pastoral issue of considerable seriousness, to an extent that is surprising to those of us in the twenty-first century. Athanasius, as an exemplary pastor, would regularly use this opportunity to offer a mixture of ethical exhortation and theological instruction designed to prepare people’s hearts for the remembrance of the events of Easter. They are a relatively under-used section of Athanasius’ corpus among scholars of Athanasius, overshadowed by his better known works such as The Incarnation of the Word, Against the Arians and The Life of Anthony. However, as these letters are a place where Athanasius focuses on the practicalities of church life at the most important period in the church calendar, they offer some of the most easily accessible insights into his understanding of the nature and life of the Church, and how his understanding of the Trinity shapes that.

Before we can begin on this task however, I wish to propose a somewhat polemic prolegomena so as to indicate some of the differences between Athanasius’ Trinitarian thinking on these matters and those that often occur in contemporary theological discussions. It is important to grasp that Athanasius is not a social Trinitarian. He does not present the Godhead as a community of persons who are united by their mutual love.

Writing in the fourth century, in the autumn years of the Roman Empire as it nestled around the Mediterranean, Athanasius is not faced with the modern problem of trying to find ground in reality for the human experience of love, or of trying to reconcile equality with authority and submission. These problems of how to establish communities which are ordered and in which love is honoured and can flourish are modern problems—part of the unwanted price tag of the Enlightenment project that continues to constitute the basic operating assumptions of our societies. These problems, and the increasing sense of a loss of community and even of a loss of the dignity of the individual person that come with them, are not Athanasius’ problems in the way that they are ours. For him and for those to whom he wrote, the existence of love, of persons, of relationships of authority and submission, of equality, are reasonably unproblematic and so do not need to be addressed as a Athanasius

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problem for which the Trinity can provide the answer, the ontological ground for our social needs. For Athanasius, the idea that the reality of love and relationships needs justification would seem as puzzling to him as Descartes’ need to prove his own existence through logical argument, to infer that he must exist because he is thinking. These kinds of problems, which cast such a shadow over intellectual and popular discourse for the last few centuries, and which drive so many of the contemporary appeals to the Trinity to justify social practices in the church, simply are not the problems that existed front and centre for Athanasius and his society.

Nor does Athanasius conceive of the Godhead as a community of individuals who are united by their love, so that the relationship of Father, Son and Spirit can provide a more or less direct model of human communities such as the Church. For Athanasius the relationship of the Father and the Son is like a speaker and their word (for the Son is the Word), like a light and the ray of light that emanates from it, and like a fountain and the stream that it produces (all analogies that Athanasius turns to regularly to explain the nature of the Father–Son relationship). That is, the relationship of Father, Son and Spirit is not conceived of, as with most modern social Trinitarianism, as three pre-existing individuals who come together in a community forged by their mutual relationships of love. Rather, the relationship is understood primarily around the statement of the Nicene Creed that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, light from light, true God from true God, and so the Son and Father are related by the Father being the source of the Son, and the Son emanating eternally from the Father—a kind of relationship that is like a father producing a child, and the sun giving off light, more than two pre-existing people learning to love one another.

Thus, one of the major ways in which the ‘relevance’ of the Trinity in the present is expounded is almost entirely absent in Athanasius. This missing line of argument is that our need for some kind of firm ground for the reality of personal, loving relationships is answered by the existence of a divine community of mutual love whose existence precedes our own and out of whose bounty our existence took shape, such that the existence of

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a Triune God demonstrates that relationships are fundamental to reality. This argument finds purchase on neither the problems of the fourth century which Athanasius sought to address, nor on the doctrine of the Trinity as expressed in the Nicene Creed and expounded in Athanasius’ writings.

For Athanasius, the Trinity is about how radically and fundamentally different the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Spirit is to anything like the relationships that exist between human beings. The relationships within the Godhead occur between persons who are of the very same being, whereas the relationships that occur between humans are between persons who are of different beings, or essences, who are individuals separate from one another, each of us residing in our own body and having our own, unique, essence. Hence, there is very little direct application of the Trinity to the life of the Church in Athanasius’ writing, little attempt to present the Trinity as a social project to be realised within the Church’s life.

However, ‘little’ is not the same as ‘none’, and there are places where Athanasius makes the connection from Trinity to Church more or less directly. Humanity is made after the image of God, and the qualities that should be present in the life of the Church such as love, unity, purity, authority, submission, equality and the like are also descriptive of the relationship of the Father and the Son. Hence, there is ground in Athanasius’ thought for some move from the qualities that characterise the relationships within the Godhead to those qualities that should characterise the Church because we are, in some important sense, like God, and the fact that the same names like ‘love’ and ‘unity’ are used for our human relationships and for those divine relationships in the Godhead suggests that the realities being so named have some substantial common ground among us and among the divine Persons. Accordingly, Athanasius does make this kind of move from the Trinitarian relationships directly to the life of the Church occasionally and in quite limited ways in his writings, such as the following: I know these [words] are grievous, not only to those who dispute with Christ, but also to the schismatics; for they are united together, as men of kindred feelings. For they have Athanasius

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Part 2

Trinitarian themes

Prayer What the doctrine of the Trinity shows us about prayer Chew-Chern Morgan

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et’s play a word association game. When we think ‘prayer’, what words pop immediately into our minds? What does the word ‘prayer’ conjure up?

When I posed this question to a bunch of people, the usual suspects emerged. Top contenders were ‘quiet times’, ‘amen’, ‘requests’, ‘Father’, ‘talking’, ‘relationship’. None of those words are a real surprise to us, are they? If you pose this same question to the nearest bunch of Christians, you will probably find them reappearing on your list!

And what’s more, it is also no real surprise not to see the word ‘Trinity’ on this list. After all, ‘Trinity’ is really not the typical word that jumps to mind when we think ‘prayer’. If anything, it is more likely associated with ‘tricky apologetics’, ‘mind-bender’ or ‘theological textbooks’. The doctrine of the Trinity seems so abstract and cerebral, so much about the transcendent nature of our God, that it is hard to see how it’s associated with prayer, something so immensely tangible, down to earth, day to day. Can the doctrine of the Trinity really have anything to say about prayer?

But the real surprise is that, far from being removed from prayer, the doctrine of the Trinity actually has everything to do with prayer! Far from being a remote truth that can be safely set aside when we get down to the business of praying, the Trinity is what anchors the very heart of Christian prayer. And recognising Prayer

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that will mean recognising that the Trinity is good news for the praying person, which can bring much wonder, gladness and confidence to our prayers!

So what does the Trinity have to do with prayer? What is the good news of the Trinity for prayer?

The Trinity sets the possibility for prayer Firstly, the Trinity is in fact the very warp and woof of prayer. How so? Consider what prayer is, what prayer needs. Prayer needs a main building block, from which it gets its breath of life, without which it will not just crumble but melt away into nothingness, into non-existence. That building block is relationship. Prayer is only possible where there is relationship, communication, speech. That is because the essence of prayer is one speaking to another, within a relationship.

But such a reality, one filled with communicating, with speaking, with relating didn’t need to be. Yes, a universe like this is so second-nature to us that we don’t even blink in wonder at it anymore—an alternative reality is simply inconceivable. But life didn’t need to take this shape. Prayer didn’t need to be.

But prayer is because the God who made creation, shapes creation, defines creation, is Trinity. The reality-setting God is a Triune God in which relationship is. From the first, Scripture shows us a God who relates within himself. At the pinnacle of creation, God spoke within himself when he brought humanity into being: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ (Genesis 1:26).

With the advent of Jesus, God in the flesh, we are given the glasses to see the full glory of this God who speaks within himself … he is the Triune God, he is the God who exists as three persons in a single Godhead. And these three Persons in the one Godhead have relationship. They communicate and relate to each other with a love, harmony and unity that have always existed. The Father’s love for the Son is before the foundation of the world (John 17:24), and is so total that he shares with the Son everything he does (John 5:20). The Son reciprocates with passionate love that seeks the will and the glory of the Father above all

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(John 5:30; 17:1–4) and the Spirit likewise is fully concerned not with himself, but with glorifying the Son who glorifies the Father (John 16:13–14).

Thus relationship originates with the Trinity. Were there no creation, no reality outside of God, relationship would still reside in the Creator whereby the Father, Son and Spirit subsist in perfect love and express that perfect love to one another. From eternity to eternity, because the Triune God is, relationship is.

And this intrinsic reality is graciously allowed to spill over into created reality. When creation came into being, relationship invaded time and space. The first man and woman were to hold fast in bonded unity, and as humanity increased, the web of relationships expanded and grew complex, for good or for bad.

But the relationship-rich God was not satisfied to merely imprint that reality onto human-to-human relationship. Indeed, the pinnacle of his relational nature is that he extends relationship with himself to man, a mere creature. He did not merely give horizontal relationships to his creatures, but endowed the ultimate vertical relationship to his creatures! The wonder of the universe is that God relates outwards, towards subjects outside of the Godhead. Thus, not only has relationship invaded the universe, but more than that, the relationship within the Trinity has invaded the universe.

And thus prayer is. Only with Trinitarian relationship turned outside of the Trinity is prayer even possible. God now speaks not only within himself, but to his creatures (Genesis 3:9). And not only does humanity speak to each other, it can also address its creator, God. Jesus, who prays to the Father, confirms this for us. As the God-man, his prayers to God are simultaneously godly speech from God to God, and godly speech from man to God. Thus, ‘the fact that the Son of God is at the same time God the Son incarnate shows that discourse in prayer reflects or images the divine discourse that characterises the relationships within the Trinity’1.

1.

G Goldsworthy, Prayer and the Knowledge of God (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003), 28.

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The eternal Son, while on earth, continued his heavenly conversation with the Father in prayer. And being our true representative, he shows us that prayer did not start with man, but derives from this prior reality, the reality of his intra-Trinitarian relationship that existed way before any creature was created to give praise to God. Do we see how knowing the Trinity means we can dig right in and understand the possibility of prayer? Prayer is not unique to Christianity ... in countless world religions prayer is an undisputed pillar of faith. But those who belong to the Triune God are given a unique understanding of the source of prayer! Unitarian gods (say, the gods of Islam and modern Judaism) cannot explain relationship, speech or prayer; they can only take created reality as they see it around them, and transpose that into a supposed man–divine relationship. But the Triunity of God allows us the insight that Christian prayer is not a mimicry of human existence but belongs to the very heart of the universe because it belongs to the very heart of God. So when you find prayer mundane, take a moment and think about what is really happening when you mutter that little prayer in your ordinary kitchen. You are stepping into a conversation that is older than time itself, one that belongs to the very court of heaven. God himself has enlarged the circle, has made a place for us in that delightful conversation that has existed from infinity past! So when prayer looks small and insignificant, look up to the Triune God and marvel at the cosmic proportions of prayer.

The Trinity sets the posture of prayer So prayer is possible because God allows us to relate to him.

Now speech that accompanies relationship is moulded by that relationship. As we know a person, we speak. My speech to my husband has changed considerably since the day I first met him— many of the things I say to him now would have caused extremely red cheeks if I had said them when we first shook hands!

Appropriate speech is what fits the relationship.

So how can our speech to God fit our relationship with him?

What is our knowledge of him, and hence, how do we speak to him?

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We have considered that, right from the start of creation, God has graciously turned relationship with himself towards us. Even when sin messed it all up, that possibility of knowing God has never been shut off and the wonderful story that overarches Scripture is that of God tenaciously gripping onto relationship with humanity, calling a people to himself, revealing himself and relating. Thus, in the midst of the burning bush, Moses heard the name of God, Yahweh (Exodus 3:14). And through the tumultuous history of Israel, Yahweh revealed himself more and more so that his name became filled with meaning, and his people could call on the name of the Lord.

But it was not until Jesus the Son walked on earth that humanity started really having a chance to know God much more truly and deeply. As Judea watched Jesus turn water into wine, heal the lame and the leper, proclaim the forgiveness of sin, die and rise again, they truly saw ‘God with us’. And hence their knowledge of Yahweh exploded and Jewish Christians began calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ (Philippians 2:10–11).

And in manifesting himself, Jesus revealed not only himself as the Lord but also the one who sent him as Father. The unknowable Father whom no-one has ever seen is now knowable (John 1:18)!

And revelation piled upon revelation as Jesus ascended and the Spirit of Christ descended. In the Spirit’s ministry, the Son who reveals the Father is further revealed (John 16:12–15), and the Spirit himself is revealed in the very pages of his own-inspired Scripture.

Thus with the gospel, the veil is pulled back. Humanity can now stare into the heart of the mystery of God. Revelation has been poured out and the name of God filled out—Trinity is his name. So now the name that the people of God bear is that of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). The gospel has brought forth the name of God in all its glory. The gospel, in freeing us for a fuller relationship with God, shows us the God to whom we are now free to belong.

And so, how can prayer be anything now but Trinitarian?

Standing on this side of the cross, our privilege is to relate to God as he truly is, not in shadows and mists as Israel did. As we know Prayer

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