While all Christians believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, it is often the case that somewhat fewer are confident about the difference it makes. If they are members of a church where the Bible is consistently expounded in a manner that self-consciously connects to the historic creedal tradition, then they will no doubt have seen how the Trinity connects to the narratives and the theology of the Scriptures. Yet they may still be somewhat unclear about the present, practical difference the doctrine makes to their everyday lives.
The irony of this is that the doctrine is, in fact, one of the most immediately practical for Christians. The Trinity is far from being an abstract doctrine, and is not to be relegated to a virtual appendix in Christian theology. On the contrary, trinitarianism shapes everything, from Christian doctrine to Christian practice. If the Christian is one who is adopted by the Father through being united to Christ by the Holy Spirit, then to be a Christian is to have an identity that is trinitarian at its very core. Thus everything the believer is and everything the believer does has to be understood at some level in trinitarian terms.
Even some of the elements of trinitarianism that seem at first glance somewhat abstract are of immense existential and practical significance. It is surely no coincidence that the development of the classical doctrine of the Trinity is inextricably connected to the development of liturgies and patterns of worship in the ancient church.1 Further, when Athanasius refused to compromise on the issue of the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, this was for reasons vital both to salvation and to the heart of the Christian’s worship and life: prayer. Prayer is, after all, the most intimate point of practical communion between the believer and God, and that intimacy is itself rooted in the action of God in Christ towards God the Father through the Holy Spirit. As salvation is trinitarian, so inevitably is prayer.2
When questions of the Trinity and prayer typically arise, they tend to focus on issues of the object of prayer. Do we pray to the Father alone, or to each of the persons of the Trinity? Is it legitimate to pray to Jesus? Do we pray by ascribing different roles in creation and salvation to each of the three persons? All of these are legitimate concerns and reflect a desire to allow the trinitarian economy of salvation to shape the believer’s devotional life. But there is more to trinitarian prayer than the question of to whom prayer is to be directed and for what. The Trinity is first significant not so much for the shape of our prayers as for their very foundation. Trinity and Christology establish prayer as part of the economy of salvation itself. In fact, if God were not Trinity, then specifically Christian prayer would not exist in any form, for there would be no means of addressing God. Thus in this chapter we will look first at the foundation of prayer in the Trinity and then at how the trinitarian work of salvation shapes the practice of prayer.
Central to understanding the connection of the Trinity to prayer is Christ’s role as priest. Prayer is an integral part of his priestly role, and it is this that provides the objective basis for the prayers of the saints. It is because Christ is the great intercessor on behalf of his people that his people’s own intercessions are heard by the Father.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism summarizes Christ’s priesthood well:
Q. 25. How does Christ execute the office of a priest?
A. Christ executes the office of a priest, in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice, and reconcile us to God, and in making continual intercession for us.
Here the Catechism summarizes an important strand of biblical teaching. The New Testament makes a clear connection between the prayers of the saints and the intercession of Christ before the Father. The argument of the book of Hebrews makes this a central point: the divine–human mediator is central to the Christian’s status before God and to understanding the ongoing nature of divine activity in our salvation. Intercession is an integral part of Christ’s priestly action that continues in the present. As he died on Calvary as a sacrifice for sin, so he now lives before the Father to offer that sacrifice on behalf of his people.
There are a number of observations we can make about this priesthood in relation to the Trinity.
First, we should note that Christ’s priesthood points clearly to God’s sovereignty in salvation. The Lord chooses who is to be a priest (Lev. 8). Specifically, we are told that he appointed Christ as priest (Heb. 5:4–6). This is demonstrated in the historical narrative of the virgin birth and the Spirit’s anointing of Christ at his baptism. This sets all of the actions of Christ’s priesthood, including his intercession within the context of God’s sovereign will. Thus the definitive act of prayer – that of Christ to his Father – is an act of the sovereign God.
Second, we should note that Christ’s priesthood in general reveals the trinitarian nature of God. As Christ declares in his high priestly prayer in the Gospel of John, he has been sent by the Father. He is also one who is empowered by the Spirit at his baptism. There is no other God than that God who has revealed himself in the actions of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They are all bound together in the economy of salvation in a manner that exhibits a perfect harmony of intention and execution. Thus all of Christ’s actions, including his intercession are to be set within the context of a trinitarian understanding of God.
Indeed, the New Testament makes it quite clear that the human act of prayer is intimately connected to the trinitarian actions of God and is in fact enfolded and subsumed within that larger divine action. Thus in Romans 8:26 Paul declares that the Spirit intercedes for believers in their weakness, when they do not know what they should pray for. The personhood of the Spirit is important here: intercession is a personal activity. Furthermore, Paul is stirring up the believer to confidence by placing human prayer within the divine economy of salvation relating to the persons of the Trinity. Thus the human act of prayer is clearly to be understood against the background of a more profound reality: the intercession of the Spirit for the saints. This places the believer’s prayers within the very trinitarian life of God himself and is both a doctrinal truth and a practical reality
Third, given this we should observe that this trinitarian economy of salvation serves to make the accomplishment of salvation by Christ itself an act of devotion and prayer. Christ’s earthly life was marked by prayer, and that was also closely connected to his obedience and suffering (Heb. 5:7–8). This also places love at the centre of salvation: Christ offers himself through his prayer to God the Father as an act of love towards both him and those on whose behalf he prays.
Furthermore, while we should never reduce the work of Christ to that of mere moral example, it is clear from Christ’s own life that his intercession is in part paradigmatic for the believer. As Christ prayed to the Father, so he instructs his followers to do the same (Matt. 6:9; 26:39). As Christ prayed for strength from the Father, and for the Father’s will to be done, so he instructs his followers to do the same (Matt. 6:10–11; 26:39). And even in the practice of drawing aside to pray, Christ makes it clear that he is setting his disciples an example to follow (Matt. 6:6; Mark 6:46).
This then brings us to the first practical point about prayer and the Trinity: Christ’s trinitarian priesthood should fill Christians with confidence and be an encouragement to all those who fear God to approach him. This is because in Christ we have the perfect example and the perfect intermediary. While there can be a tendency to understand Christ’s intercession as something that cajoles the Father into granting something he is not immediately keen to do, such a view rests upon a failure to understand the significance of that which Athanasius saw so clearly: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are one God and all desire the same things. Thus Christ as the God-man asks the Father only for that which the Father desires to give him, and he does so as one who perfectly understands what it is to be human. When Christ prays to the Father for us, the Father will grant him what he asks, for it is only what he himself desires anyway.
Yet the very fact that in Christ human nature has been brought into communion with the Godhead also has profound significance. Human beings instinctively like intermediaries in difficult situations, even trivial ones. When we move into the spiritual realm and address the matter of a holy God and a sinful people, the desirability of an intermediary is dramatically increased. When Adam fell, he feared God because he knew he was naked and thus incapable of standing before God in his own strength. There was no intermediary, so he covered himself and hid from the Lord’s presence. At Sinai the people of Israel were terrified by the noise and storm surrounding God’s presence and thus Moses acted on behalf of them on the mountain, an arrangement later formalized in the rituals surrounding the Tent of Meeting. Most significantly, in the Old Testament the priest entered the Holy Place alone to make atonement and to offer intercession on behalf of the people.
Against this background the incarnation takes on specific importance with regard to prayer. Typically, of course, the incarnation has often been construed as necessary with reference to the death of Christ. The influence of the Anselmic argument has undoubtedly exerted huge influence here. Yet it is also clear that a similar argument for the incarnation can be derived from Christ’s intercession, which is hardly surprising given that sacrifice and intercession are both aspects of his priesthood.
First, Christ’s humanity makes him an appropriate person to intercede on our behalf, for he knows what it is like to be human and is from our perspective an approachable intermediary (Heb. 4:14–16). He is human like us; he has been tempted in every way like us except he is without sin. He understands what it is like to be us, and approaches his Father on that basis. In Christ God does not merely stoop down to the level of humanity: human nature is carried up into an intimate relation with the divine.
Second, his divine nature makes his intercession not merely something of power but something that has an absolute guarantee of success. Our prayers are powerful because they rest upon his status as both sacrificer and sacrifice. As the Levitical priests both sacrificed and then offered that sacrifice to God, so Christ is both sacrificed on the cross and then presents that sacrifice before his Father as he intercedes for his people in heaven. The unity of the priestly action of Christ is thus effective and powerful and now finds its location at the very heart of God.
This is one very practical reason why the fourth-century debates about the consubstantiality of the Father and Son – the fights over the homoousion – were so practically vital. While contemporary scholarship has demonstrated the complexity of the fourth-century debates and effectively undermined the old taxonomy that pitted clearly defined parties against each other, the practical importance of the homoousion (of same substance) can still be shown by comparing it with one of the alternative terms that emerged in the 360s: homoiousion (of similar substance). Similarity seems to offer a reasonable alternative to the options of radical difference or absolute identity. Yet the compromise is fatal to the economy of salvation. Similarity supposes difference and, as Athanasius and his allies argued, if the Son is not God as the Father is God, he cannot save. Such a Christ could not draw humanity up into the full communion with God that salvation involved.
When reflecting on the importance of the Trinity for prayer, we may make the same point from the perspective of Christ’s intercession. If Father and Son are only of similar substance, then a potential gap always exists between that which the Father wills and that which the Son desires. As noted above, that which guarantees the efficacy of the Son’s intercession is that he asks for that which the Father desires to give. We may add the Spirit to this and say that the Spirit’s intercession as described in Romans 8 is also effective only because he too acts at all times in accordance with the divine will because he too is fully God. The power of the intercessions of Christ and the Spirit rests on the fact that they desire from God the Father only that which he himself delights to grant. If that is undermined by any gap between the nature of their being and that of the Father, then the confidence we can have in our prayers is effectively shattered.
In fact, we can conclude this summary understanding of the relationship between Trinity and intercession by noting that it is simply one specific element in the larger trinitarian economy of salvation. Father, Son and Holy Spirit all play their part in creation and providence, and all play their part in salvation too.
Practically speaking, therefore, a healthy, vibrant prayer life depends to a large extent upon a good understanding of trinitarian doctrine. Only then will we both understand what it is we are doing and have confidence that it will be effective and powerful. A correct doctrine of God as Trinity does not guarantee a healthy prayer life, but a defective doctrine of the Trinity guarantees a prayer life that will be much less than it should be.
Given this, we now need to address the second aspect of the trinitarian understanding of prayer. If the doctrine of the Trinity explains the foundation of prayer in the person and work of Jesus Christ, Son of the Father, through the Holy Spirit, then how practically should this shape the human act of prayer?
Given what we noted above, it is perhaps strange that very few theologians have ever attempted to articulate an understanding of the practice of prayer that is decisively rooted in understanding the Trinity. One notable exception to this is the English Puritan John Owen (1616–83). His On Communion with God in Three Persons (1657) is a masterful account of how the three persons interact on the economy of salvation and of the implications this has for how believers should frame their devotional life.
Before outlining Owen’s arguments, it is worth noting that it is no coincidence that he produced such a treatise. Reformed orthodoxy, the tradition of theology that stemmed from the Reformed wing of the Reformation, was in part driven by the desire to understand the connection between an anti-Pelagian understanding of salvation, which placed a high premium on the sovereignty of God’s grace, and the fact that God is Trinity. Thus Reformed orthodoxy was occupied to a significant extent with working out the implications of trinitarianism for salvation in all its aspects. This operated at both the strictly dogmatic level, where theologians developed concepts such as the covenant of redemption, and the practical level, where such questions as ‘To whom should I pray to give thanks for particular elements of my salvation?’ arose.3
Thus Reformed orthodoxy at its best was profoundly trinitarian, setting redemption within a trinitarian structure and thus the identity of redeemed men and women within a trinitarian context. The believer is the one who has communion with God the Father by union with God the Son through the Holy Spirit. Prayer, as a central act of the believer’s life, is thus to be understood in trinitarian terms.
Many Christians, of course, instinctively acknowledge the identity of God as Trinity and the significance of this for their prayer life by ending their prayers with a formulaic reference something akin to ‘to you, God our Father, in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, by the power of His Holy Spirit’. This is good as far as it goes, for it acknowledges the fact that each person of the Trinity is involved in some way in our salvation and in our action of prayer, which derives from that salvation. Yet, as with all such formulas, we need to make sure that the words we use lead us into a deeper understanding of what we do.
Owen’s argument rests upon the assumption that, in their natural state, human beings live in darkness, cut off from God, who is, by way of contrast, light.4 Thus any discussion of communion with God or of prayer to him is predicated upon the saving action of God in Christ and on the believer’s union with him. Owen divides this communion in two. There is the perfect communion that will be enjoyed only in eternity; and there is an initial, incomplete communion we have here and now. The former is to be seen as the perfection of the latter and thus, in a very deep sense, as being continuous with it.5 This is consistent with what we have already noted about the foundation of our intercession and salvation: the work of Christ before the Father by the Spirit.
Owen then moves from this foundation to state that the believer has distinct communion with Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Owen’s primary text for this is 1 John 5:7, the so-called Johannine comma. Taken by itself, of course, this would be extremely weak as support for Owen’s argument, given its status as a later interpolation. Yet Owen’s argument does not depend upon this verse. Clearly, there is the larger trinitarian structure of salvation that lies behind his thinking at this point and that he elaborates at great length elsewhere.6 There are also other texts to which he points, for example Ephesians 2:18, which distinguish economic roles of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the believer’s communion with God.
Worship is also key to the foundation of Owen’s trinitarian understanding of prayer. For him worship involves making God the object of the graces of the soul, faith, love, trust, joy, and so on. And Scripture ascribes each of these to each member of the Godhead. For example, the Father is the object of faith because he testifies to the Son, and in believing his testimony we show faith in the Father (1 John 5:9). The Son too is an object of faith (John 14:1). And the sin of unbelief is characterized as opposition to the Holy Spirit. A similar arrangement applies to the matters of love and joy as well.7
The same basic distinction of persons in the one economy of salvation can be noted relative to actions. Thus the Father teaches the promise of salvation (John 6:45), but so does the Son (Matt. 17:5) and the Spirit (John 14:26). In each case Scripture attributes acts in the economy of salvation to the different persons of the Godhead, even when the same act is being ascribed to each of them.
For Owen this has implications for the practice of prayer. It is not enough for the believer to ascribe salvation to God as an undifferentiated one. The nuances of Scripture reflect nuances in the economy of salvation and these are to be reflected in the act of prayer. We may observe, therefore, that the standard trinitarian close to prayer, from Owen’s perspective, fails to do justice to the richness of the trinitarian content of salvation. Those who do not allow trinitarianism to permeate the content and structure of their prayer are not allowing Scripture to regulate their prayer in a truly Christian way.
As a good trinitarian, Owen is aware that one can never talk exclusively about one person of the Godhead without including at some level the other two. Failure to understand that leads inexorably towards tritheism. Owen holds to the standard patristic axiom, that external works of the Godhead are works of the whole God. There is also a concurrence of each of the persons in every act.8 Thus when Owen talks of distinct communion with each of the persons, he is speaking of the ‘order in the dispensation of grace which God is pleased to hold out in the gospel’.9 In other words, he believes that Christians should frame their prayers to God in a manner that takes specific account of the foundation, execution and application of salvation.
Thus when Owen addresses the matter of communion with the Father, the central point he wants the believer to understand is that the economy of salvation reveals the Father as a God of love. Unlike creation and fall, which show God the Father as sovereign and powerful, and then righteous and wrathful against sin, under the gospel the Father is pre-eminently revealed as loving.10
Owen here adopts the standard distinction between the love of good pleasure and the love of friendship, both of which he says should be ascribed to the Father.11 The distinction is important, particularly in a day like ours, where love has been reduced to something sentimental or even merely sexual. Love is biblically and historically a much richer concept than the attenuated idea presented in a myriad soap operas and sitcoms.
The love of good pleasure is God the Father’s determined will to do good. Thus the whole of the economy of redemption, rooted in the love of God as articulated in John 3:16, is thus rooted in this. Yet there is more to divine love than this basic loving purpose. There is also a more intimate, personal love, expressed in texts such as John 14:23, that binds the Father together with the individual Christian.
Owen correctly sees that mistakes at this point are often the source of pastoral difficulties for Christians. For example, there is the idea that Christ’s atonement is somehow an offering made by a Son who loves sinners to a Father who is angry with them and who thus needs to be cajoled into changing his mind. This kind of theology is predicated on a view of God the Father that is likely to cause problems, as the believer’s mind is filled with concerns about the attitude of God the Father towards her. Indeed, we may even press it further and say that it is ultimately lethal to any understanding of prayer: if the believer’s prayer is powerful because of the intercession of the Son and Spirit, but these two are at odds with the Father, then how can the Christian have any confidence that prayer will be answered? Owen puts forward the contrary, stated in a powerful and beautiful way:
Few can carry up their hearts and minds to this height of faith, as to rest their souls in the love of the Father; they live below it, in the troublesome region of hopes and fears, storms and clouds. All here is serene and quiet. But how to attain this pitch they know not. This is the will of God, that he may always be eyed as benign, kind, tender, loving, and unchangeable therein; and that peculiarly as the Father, as the great fountain and spring of all gracious communications and fruits of love. This is that which Christ came to reveal.12
We can draw some obvious practical results that flow from this. First, prayer is to be confident because we approach a God who loves us. That we are praying to God the Father as our Father is itself evidence that he first loved us, for it is predicated upon a relationship he has sovereignly established. The opening of the Lord’s Prayer is full of theological significance upon which the believer should meditate. She does not approach a distant deity or a God who relates to her simply as a lord relates to a vassal or a master to a servant. The Lord is our Father and that sets the tone both of respect and intimacy that come from paternal love.
Second, if God loves us as Father, then prayer is to be understood as a responsive act of love on our part. If God’s love to us is one of bounty, to use Owen’s phrase, one that flows out to us from his being, then our love to him is one of duty. Yet this duty is to be understood in affiliative terms. It is not a duty that is the foundation for our relationship with God, but it is a response to that relationship. Prayer is thus part of our loving response, framed by love and rooted in our understanding God the Father as love.
The result of this is that Owen regards reflection upon the love of God the Father as central to Christian piety. It encourages us to delight in God, to respond to him in love and to have exalted thoughts of him. All of these are important elements of a healthy prayer life and also indicate that doctrine, so often decried as the enemy of piety, is actually central to piety and foundational to a proper attitude in prayer. Correct doctrine in itself, of course, does not guarantee piety; but it is a precondition to it. When believers come before God in prayer, it is vital that they have a clear understanding that the God to whom they pray is loving, and that requires a solid understanding of the role of God the Father in the economy of salvation. It also drives believers towards God the Son.
The centrality of love to Owen’s understanding of God the Father is connected to his understanding of God the Son. God the Son reveals the love of God the Father. Yet the Son also has a distinct role to play in the believer’s communion with God: he is the mediator and as the principle distinct act of God the Father is his love, so that of the Son is grace. This section of Owen’s work is by far the longest, and reflects the fact that Owen’s theology is Christological at its very core: the mediation of Christ is the supreme revelation of God and the dynamic centre of salvation.
Owen divides grace into three. First, there is the grace of Christ’s person, in terms of his personal excellence; there is the grace of free favour; and there is the grace of the fruits of the Spirit.13 As to the first, Owen sees Christ’s grace as involving his incarnation, which was a free act of the Godhead, the complete sufficiency of the incarnate Christ to save, and his complete suitability to meet all of the real needs of fallen human beings.14
This communion of the believer with Christ ties in with the Father because it is only in Christ that God is revealed as loving and merciful. Other attributes, such as justice, patience and wisdom are revealed elsewhere and then more perfectly in Christ.15 But only in Christ is love revealed. Of course, as noted above, love is an attribute of the Father, but that love of the Father is made manifest exclusively in the sending of the Son. Thus the Son reveals the love of the Godhead for sinners.16 The same is also true of his mercy.17 Again we can see the immediate significance of this for prayer. To thank God the Father for his love is to reflect upon the mission of Christ; and knowing that the mission of Christ arises out of the love of God the Father reinforces our confidence that our intercessions will be heard because Christ’s intercession is itself part of the Father’s loving will. Only in Christ, Owen believes, do we find all the attributes of God perfectly manifested and set forth in a way that brings comfort, rather than fear or darkness.18
In fact, Owen sees Scripture as going further than simply presenting Christ as comfort. Communion with God the Son is to be understood in conjugal terms, as a marriage between Christ and the believer. While much of Owen’s textual support for this is rooted in a traditional allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, which some modern readers may find unpersuasive, at least in isolation, he is of course also building on clear New Testament teaching as found, for example, in Ephesians 5. In this context it is interesting that Owen explores the idea in a slightly unusual way. Whereas the tendency is often to focus on the unitive aspect in the analogy of Christ and the church to human marriage, he focuses primarily on the mutual self-revelation that takes place between husband and wife. Christ in taking the church as his bride reveals his thoughts to the saints, and the saints in turn reveal their thoughts to him. This is at the heart of the mutual delight that Christ and the saints have in each other.19 The Christian approaches God in Christ as if Christ were a loving husband. Love and delight are to characterize the relationship.
In addition to the conjugal relation Owen also identifies adoption as providing another guiding motif for understanding communion with God the Son. In Christ the believer is adopted as a child of the Father and thus approaches the loving God as Father. Again this is to have a profound impact upon the way we pray, especially giving us boldness in our approach.20 One might also add that it offers us a framework for praying about suffering: nothing is more important to a loving earthly father than both appropriate loving discipline for his children, which may be experienced by them at times as a form of suffering, and alleviating their unnecessary suffering. Our status in Christ as sons and daughters of God the Father should shape how we address the matter of suffering in our supplications and intercessions.
Thus when we think of God and approach him in prayer, Owen would argue that the love of the Father is manifested through the forgiveness and adoption we have through Jesus Christ the Son. That gives us confidence in our approach because it gives us confidence in our status and in God’s disposition towards us. Again doctrine is central, not in a dry way but as that which shapes and suffuses the believer’s devotions with appropriate and affective thoughts of Christ.
Owen stands in the sound biblical and theological tradition of seeing the Holy Spirit as the agent of God’s work in creation. In this context Owen draws first upon the biblical notions of the Spirit as Comforter. Of course, by this point in Owen’s argument it should be clear that the comfort the Spirit provides is itself trinitarian: the comfort of knowing personally the love of the Father as revealed in the Son. This is why Jesus’ ascension was a good thing, because then the Spirit came in fullness and Jesus was, we might say, present everywhere.21
For Owen the primary significance of the Spirit is that he draws attention to Christ. Thus he brings to the believer’s mind the words of Christ, something that is constitutive of the comfort the Spirit provides: the promises of Christ and the revelation of God the Father’s love are the foundation of the believer’s comfort and assurance.22 The Spirit also sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts and assures us of our adoption. Again we can see the obvious trinitarian context of this.23
Owen is aware, however, that the ministry of the Spirit has historically been subject to two errors. First, there are those who effectively ignore and practically despise the ministry of the Spirit. Owen is a man – and a Puritan – of his time, and sees this to be the error of conformist Anglicans with a high view of formal liturgy.24 On the other side, Owen notes those who talk up the Spirit without reference to Word or ordinance. This was the error of radicals.25 For Owen, in contrast to both, prayer is to be in the Spirit. That means it is to be rooted in the Word and the word, as both reveal God to us. Second, prayer is to glorify God, for that is what the Spirit is meant to do. And as Christians are those in whom the Spirit dwells, then our lives, and especially perhaps our prayers, are to do the same. The trinitarian function of the Spirit spills over into the purpose of our prayers.26
Further, there is the fact that the Spirit is the Spirit of adoption.27 It is through the Spirit that the believer cries out to God as Father. Again this ties in with the basic trinitarian structure of salvation and of the Christian’s identity: the Spirit enables us to call out to God as Father as we have been adopted by him through the Son.
Because God is a Trinity and because we commune with him as a Trinity, Owen believes that we are to be conscious of how each person works within the economy of salvation. Thus in each section of the discourse he highlights specific things the believer is to understand about each of the persons. At the end of the treatise, however, he addresses specifically the nature of prayer and the Godhead.
He makes it clear that the divine essence is to be the object of worship. Thus as Father, Son and Holy Spirit all partake of the divine essence, so all are to be objects of worship and invocation. Owen sees this taught, for example, in Ephesians 2:18, where we have access to God the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit. Yet Owen also believes each person is to be worshipped individually.
This touches on a question sometimes raised with regard to prayer: Can one address prayer only to God the Father or also to the Son and the Holy Spirit? Scripture, after all, seems to give explicit sanction only to the first. Yet Owen makes the eminently reasonable point that both Son and Spirit are divine, which fact should provoke our adoration, and that both do saving works, which should provoke our gratitude.28
It is clear from the above that trinitarianism is vital to a confident prayer life, that a solid trinitarianism is vital for a healthy Christian life. There is nothing more distinctive and personal about Christianity than prayer; and here at the heart of prayer lies the doctrine of the Trinity. At a theological level trinitarianism is the basis upon which – to put it rather bluntly – prayer works. It is because we have an advocate with the Father who is of the same substance as the Father that we can be confident our prayers will be heard and answered. It is because the Spirit is God and intercedes for us in ways which transcend our comprehension that we can be confident our prayers will be heard and answered. Any teaching on prayer, and any encouragement to pray, needs to be rooted in this great doctrinal truth.
The first step to encouraging trinitarian prayer is, therefore, to cultivate a robust understanding of the Trinity in our congregations. While the world of academic theology may be said to have had something of an embarrassment of riches in terms of studies of the Trinity over the last fifty years, it seems that this has yet to make a profound impact at the local level. Thus pastors and elders need to be very self-conscious in their approach to this issue. It is only as Christians are exposed to the importance of the Trinity week by week that they will come to see the doctrine’s crucial importance for understanding the identity of Christ, the economy of salvation and the trinitarian dimensions of their own identity in Christ. The elements in this are the elements of worship itself: sermons, hymns and prayers that advocate and model trinitarianism and highlight the significance of the Trinity for the Christian life.
Of course, ours is an anti-dogmatic age, at least when those dogmas happen to be those of traditional Christian theology and seem at first glance to be rather complicated and perhaps abstract. Yet we must remember that from the role of liturgy in the formation of trinitarian dogma through to Owen’s elaborate exposition of communion with God, the church regarded the Trinity as something of huge practical, doxological importance. Pastors need to be well versed in trinitarianism and to teach it to their congregations. And that not simply as an abstract truth, but as something with obvious, vital, practical significance.
Though Owen disliked formal liturgy intensely, it is arguable that one of the best ways to cultivate and reinforce trinitarianism in worship is to recite the Nicene Creed, the definitive church statement of the doctrine, as part of regular worship. In addition, careful attention to the selection of hymns and praise songs is important. People learn from everything that happens in a worship service, not just the sermon. Indeed, there are probably many Christians who imbibe more of their theology, for good or ill, from what they sing than from what they hear taught. Not all hymns are explicitly trinitarian but we should take time to make sure that those which are trinitarian are used regularly and to good effect. Those with the gift of writing hymns and praise songs should consciously strive to make them trinitarian, both as exercises in doxology and as examples of pedagogy.
It also requires a revival in the habit of well-thought-out public prayer. Evangelicalism has tended to emphasize spontaneity as a hallmark of spiritual authenticity and vitality. While this is no doubt intended for good – nobody wants dry formalism, after all – it has nonetheless always been a somewhat specious criterion. How spontaneous can even the most contemporary praise song really be, given it is already a set form of words by the time it is used in worship? In fact, to lead in public prayer in church is not only to lead the congregation into the presence of God but it is also to influence the way the congregants themselves will pray. Such prayers are to model reverence and should also model the theology of prayer: approaching God as triune and ascribing to each person the work that Scripture specifically allocates to each one.
Finally, individual Christians must take responsibility for understanding what they do when they pray. As with so many tasks we do on a regular, routine basis, prayer is something that many of us rarely reflect upon as a theological act. Yet it is clear that prayer must be understood theologically if it is to be done confidently and joyously. And understanding how it connects to the doctrine of the Trinity is one vital – perhaps the most vital – aspect of that.
© Carl R. Trueman, 2016