Praying to Father, Son and Holy Spirit

In a comment to a recent post about prayer, Hannah explained that when she prays she likes to think of God’s attributes: his awesome power, his goodness, his love, mercy, compassion, and so on. It is fitting to praise God in this fashion, and it does help us to understand him better. But if this is carried too far (and I do not intend to suggest at all that she carries it too far), we may eventually start to think of God in terms of these attributes. God cannot be reduced to an adjective list. He is a living being.

Another Seedling wrote:

I don’t believe we are supposed to try to visualize Jesus, God, His throne, etc. I heard before that doing so is wrong because it is the same as trying to limit God. God is an infinite being that simply can’t be grasped by our finite minds. To try and do so degrades God.

Andrew’s point about God’s infinitude is certainly well taken.  It is foolhardy to think we can capture God in our imagination.  But I was surprised when he said we shouldn’t try to visualize Jesus, because Jesus is actually a human being.  The whole purpose of his incarnation was to bring God into the world so that fallen people could relate to God once again.

The Old Testament prohibited Israelites from creating images of Yahweh: “Make yourself no graven image…”  But Jesus is no graven image. His coming brought us a genuinely new revelation of God. It showed us that God is not a singleton, but a community of three persons that we now call the Trinity.  Some have argued that the doctrine of the Trinity is not found in the New Testament.  No, that word is not found in the Scripture. But there is plenty of evidence for the Trinity there.  For example, Jesus commanded the apostles to baptize “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19).  If the Son and the Holy Spirit were not God, then mentioning them in the same breath with the Father would be highly unusual to say the least. Or consider the way the 1 Peter begins:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit are also together in the closing words of 2 Corinthians:

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Belonging to an independent, non-denominational church has certain advantages, but there are some disadvantages as well. You are not constrained by all detailed doctrinal statements which you may not understand or agree with.  But you are less organically connected to ancient traditions and teachings which Christians have always understood to be important.  One example is the Trinity.  Any fair reading of Christian history should tell you that this is the primary teaching that defines orthodoxy.

The Trinity is not an abstraction or an attribute of God.  It is who God really is.  And it is essential to our understanding of the gospel.  The gospel is much more than a doctrine of justification by faith.  It is a personal relationship with God. The so-called personal relationship with God is actually a whole set of relationships; it is belonging to a community. Robert Webber made this point extremely well in his final book, Ancient-Future Worship, which was published in 2008 shortly after his passing (pp. 31-32):

The biblical God is no monad, no impersonal force, but a Triune community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The emphasis falls on community. God is one… The Triune community is a person and is personal.  The biblical and ancient definition of person is “being in a community.” God is an eternal community of love… God, this eternal being of love, desires to create other beings (persons in community) to share in his own community. God creates humanity in his image persons who dwell in his community and are actually called by God to fellowship with the community of the Godhead from the inside.

To bring fallen people into this community, one of its members, the Son, became a man.  Not an illusion of a man, but a real human being. By his death and resurrection, he binds people to himself and brings them into his own community.

Over the first three hundred years of the Church, believers struggled to put into words the truth about God that they already knew.  From the day of Pentecost onward, they found themselves worshiping the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. They had real and continual fellowship with all three.   The written doctrine of the Trinity merely described what they already had been experiencing.

If a human being told you his name, it would be impolite and dehumanizing to continually refuse to use that name when you engage him in conversation. But that it what we often do with God. Many of us address him in a generic way as “God,” “Lord,” or perhaps “Father.” Prayers directed to Jesus are less common, and addressing the Holy Spirit seems rare.  Some have even said that it is incorrect to pray to the Son or to the Holy Spirit, that we should pray only to the Father in the name of the Son through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Although there is truth to that, if we carry it too far, it depersonalizes the Son and Spirit, treating them only as the vehicles by which we reach the Father who is the real thing.  All three are God, so why shouldn’t we pray to all three?  On the other hand, I suppose that praying separately to each person can also be carried too far, because they are not three separate Gods; they are one God.  I do believe that when we approach God, it is helpful and important to envision him as a community of three persons, because that is how he revealed himself.

Early Christian prayers clearly recognize God as the Trinity.  For example, the Gloria Patri doxology from the fourth century:

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

In the ancient disciplines of prayer, believers often repeated short prayers over and over until they became cemented in their minds and personalities. One of the most famous is the so-called Jesus Prayer:

Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Although this prayer is helpful, N.T. Wright suggested a revision that is Trinitarian and less focused on the individual who is praying:

Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth: Set up your kingdom in our midst.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God: Have mercy on me, a sinner.

Holy Spirit, breath of the living God: Renew me and all the world.

If you are having difficulty engaging God in prayer, try calling him by the names he gave us: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is not a prayer technique. It is acknowledging and encountering God in an authentic way, because the Trinity is simply who God is.