Trinity and Liturgical Experience

In the latest issue of Liturgy published by The Liturgical Conference, theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen explores the trinitarian shaping of Christian worship. He approaches the three persons of the Trinity as a systematician who is deeply committed to the ways in which the Trinity fund our primary communion with God.

I wish to lay out as clearly as I can the basic trinitarian logic and narrative that undergirds and funds all of Christian life, but particularly prayer and liturgical life. This base is the trinitarian narrative that can be found in the New Testament and that was formulated doctrinally in later Christian tradition. . . . Liturgy is deeply Trinity-formed. 

. . . The Reformed Karl Barth rightly intuited that the Bible points to “the life of God Himself turned to us, the Word of God coming to us by the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ.” [See Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, bk. 2] This same insight was reached in the common ecumenical statement by Roman Catholics and Lutherans: “What God has done for the salvation of the world in Jesus Christ is transmitted in the gospel and made present in the Holy Spirit. The gospel as proclamation of God's saving action is therefore itself a salvation event.” [See http://www.pro.urbe.it/ dia-int/l-rc/doc/e_l-rc_malta.html] Liturgy and prayer is the place to present that Gospel of Christ. Liturgy is the arena in which the proclamation and sacramental acts reflect the triune nature of One God who manifests Godself as Father, Son, and Spirit.

Regarding each of the Trinity in turn, Kärkkäinen lets the reader ponder the thoughts of theologians through the ages. Here is Martin Luther on the first person of the Trinity:

The meaning and distinctive nature of [God’s] deep and wide fatherly love was masterfully captured centuries ago by the Reformer Martin Luther. While better known for his theology of justification by faith, Luther is first and foremost a theologian of love. He makes the famous distinction between two kinds of love: divine and human love. Whereas for the latter, self-interest and the principle of reciprocity is in the forefront, God's love purely and unselfishly seeks the well-being of the Other.⁴ [See Evangelical Quarterly 74, no. 3]

Human love is oriented toward objects that are inherently good, where self-love defines the content and the object of the love. Men and women love something that they believe they can enjoy. God loves in a way opposite to human love: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it …. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good.”⁵ [See Luther’s Works, 1957, 31:57]

 Here is Karl Rahner on Christ:

In contemporary theology, probably no one else has reflected as deeply on the theological and spiritual implications of divine embodiment as the means of God's self-identification with humanity as has the Catholic Karl Rahner. 

“It is a fact of faith that when God desires to manifest himself, it is as a man that he does so,” as a man who appears only in the bodily form. Indeed, on the basis of this divine embodiment, we not only know the Divine but also the meaning of the human. . .  If we want to know what man is, or what flesh means, then we must, so to speak, choose this theological definition of the statement ‘And the Word became flesh,’ saying: flesh, man as a bodily, concrete, historical being is just what comes into being when the Logos, issuing from himself, utters himself. Man is therefore God's self-utterance, out of himself into the empty nothingness of the creature.”⁶ [Rahner, in Theological Investigations, vol. 17]

Finally, Kärkkäinen’s thoughts on the Holy Spirit beckon us to expand our sense of the Spirit’s work so that we do not settle on personal piety alone as the gift but come to see in an ever-larger scope the Spirit’s role in creation itself. Those who lead the church’s worship in word and sacrament will gain a deepened energy for corporate prayer through renewal of seeing the fullness of the Three in One in the liturgy. The author’s goal is a lively trinitarian prayer for all.

- Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen is professor of systematic theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, and Docent of Ecumenics, University of Helsinki, Finland. See Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen Trinity and Revelation, vol. 2: A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), chap. 2, for a full treatment of this subject.

Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, “Loving Father, Embodied Son, and Life-Giving Spirit: The Trinitarian Narrative and Liturgical Experience,” Liturgy 30, no. 1 (2015): 60-66.

Letting Go of Too Much Control

A key requirement for good worship, according to Trey Hall, is honesty about our lives. When worship planners and leaders are too focused on “getting it right,” we easily overlook what needs to be said and shown––in language and ritual––for the sake of honesty in worship. The rubrics and orchestration of movement help to eliminate distractions from prayer, but willingness to fail leads to worship that has life.

Although the congregation Hall founded and serves has Methodist roots, he seems to be saying, with Martin Luther, that a Christian––and, by extension, Christian worship––ought to “sin boldly.”

If Jesus’ “let go of your life” guidance is true, then one mark of good worship, at least for an American context, is the capacity of the Christian community to be deliberately honest about our individual and collective failure: in a sustained and integrated fashion, to tell the truth, both liturgically and homiletically, about what has gone down, and to continue to risk failure for the sake of the Gospel.

 Good worship displays narratively and ritually the difficult truth that part of Jesus’ persistent medicine in all stages of the salvation journey is to push us again and again toward the edges of both minor pitfalls and epic failures into a subterranean grace that is finally beyond what we can predict or manage. Good worship stops resisting (or at least confesses our tendency to resist) the good news that, according to Jesus and Paul, failure is part of living a true story and therefore can be a sacrament of freedom.

Pastors, worship planners, and worship leaders working hard to avoid mistakes and ritual failure, tend to make the mistake of employing three failure avoidance strategies. They seek to:

1) Create worship that is always “excellent” because God always desires our best offering. This sounds theologically right on, but often results in hyperpolished and overproduced liturgies that leave no space for mess. . . [with] flawlessly blocked processions; perfectly timed light cues; always seamless transitions; band or organ or soloist-focused music whose preciousness or precision actually diminishes congregational singing. . .

 2) Use the denominationally sanctioned rubrics for Confession and Assurance, Prayers of the People, Great Thanksgiving, and so forth, but do not dive too deeply into the subjects they refer to. For example, it was reported that on Sunday, July 14, 2013, only twelve hours after the announcement of the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict pointed painfully to the personal and structural racism that still plagues America, 85 percent of churches failed to mention the verdict in any way in worship.

 3) Evaluate others’ failures instead of mining your own. This classic strategy appears in innumerable guises, but one small contemporary example is how fashionable it has become of late, in some mainline and evangelical Christian circles, to critique “spiritual but not religious” people.

 What makes worship good is the consistent and creatively reframed invitation—ritualized and extemporaneous, scripted and improvised—for the gathered community to intentionally trip over the stumbling block, to experience the scandal of the cross that gathers in and interprets, crucible-like, all of our mess, and to fall into the foolishness of grace.

- Trey Hall is one of the lead pastors of Urban Village Church, Chicago, Illinois. 

Trey Hall, “Failure Makes Worship Good,” Liturgy 29, no. 2 (31 Jan 2014): 20-26.